Alan Turing: The Father of AI, the Enigma Codebreaker and the Turing Test

Can machines think?  Alan Turing may have shortened the war by cracking Enigma,  but it was answering this question  that may well have been his greatest achievement.  This great, highly informative video from History Extra shows how, as part of a group of mathematicians, Turing imagined machines that could think and solve problems independently of human intervention. This was, of course, more than seven decades ago…

After the war, Turing turned his attention to the possibility of machine intelligence. In 1950, he published his groundbreaking paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, in which he introduced the Turing Test - also known as the "imitation game" - as a way of assessing whether a machine could demonstrate intelligent behaviour. The ideas he explored remain highly relevant in our age of generative AI.  I wonder what he would make of the collage of his life I just requested from an AI model (top)?

Turing’s death by suicide at the age of just 41 reflects the times in which he lived. He was unable to play the imitation game of pretending to the world to be heterosexual and so, despite the accolades for his war-work, he was pursued and prosecuted for being himself. This led to his death.  Later, of course, he would be celebrated as the father of modern computing – I just find it a desperate shame that he died thinking that his reputation was irrecoverably damaged. 

Watch the fascinating video about Turing’s life and achievements below.

Alan Turing - Celebrating the Centenary of a Genius

Today sees the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing – one of the most remarkable human beings of the twentieth century. A mathematical genius, hero of the World War II code breakers of Bletchley Park, and father of modern computing, Turing was a mathematician, cryptographer and pioneer of computer science who possessed one of the greatest brains of the 20th century. His life was one of secret accomplishments shadowed by public misfortune.

He was a bright child - condensing Einstein’s Theory of Relativity for his mum at the age of 15. He received a scholarship at King’s College, Cambridge and it is to that august university that we turn to learn more about Alan Turing’s life. In his twenties he turned his attention to one of the most important mathematical problems of the twentieth century – the Decision Problem. He conceived of a machine which would read symbols on a strip of tape – 0s and 1s and showed that dark areas in mathematics would always pose a barrier to the complete truth. This machine model became one of the cornerstones of computer science. He did this when he was only 22.

He then went on to his code breaking work, for which he is rightly famous. Here, Dr James Grime, Enigma Project Officer at Cambridge University's Millennium Mathematics Project explains the code and tells the life story of this remarkable man born 100 years ago today. It concludes with his death in 1954 – betrayed by the British Government and with only a single escape route – suicide – Turing bit from an apple he had previously laced with cyanide. This tragic end to a brilliant life was thirty years before most of his work would become public; the Official Secrets Act meant his true brilliance was not to be acknowledged until many years after his death.

Today, however, we can lift a glass to this most brilliant of men, celebrate his life and his achievements and perhaps speak softly an apology for the sins of our fathers.