The Forgotten Father of Artificial Intelligence and Computing
Before AI, before smartphones, before Google, before even the word algorithm became part of everyday language, there was a man named Alan Turing, a quiet genius whose brain raced decades ahead in an otherwise prejudiced and war-stricken world. He cracked codes, laid the foundation for modern computing and led to the start of the digital age. Yet, as has been the case with humanity always, we failed this gifted scientist. For all his brilliance and for being himself, he was prosecuted by the UK's law system then, which eventually led him to commit suicide. Let's dive into the life of another forgotten hero, Alan Turing.
The Birth of a Genius: Early Life
Alan Mathison Turing was born on 23rd June 1912 to Julius Mathison Turing and Ethel Sara Turing in Maida Vale, London. Turing had a sublime commitment and inclination towards Mathematics and Science. One of his primary school teachers even remarked that she had clever boys and hardworking boys, but Alan is a genius.
Like many other great scientists of that time, he was ridiculed in high school for his interest in math and Science. The headmaster of Sherborne School, one of the schools where Alan went, even wrote a letter to his parents stating that he should leave the school if he did not want to study other subjects like history, literature, and geography. Irrespective of what people thought during that time, Alan was fully committed to studying his favourite subjects. It is even said that he rode 97 km to school one day during the 1926 General Strike in Britain!
His hard work paid off when he was granted a fellowship to study at King's College, Cambridge, for his research papers and works in Mathematics. Turing completed his undergraduate degree from 1931 to 1934 with a first-class honours in Mathematics. It was in 1936 when Alan Turing made one of his most profound contributions, the invention of the Turing Machine!
The Turing Machine was a theoretical construct, a simple yet powerful model of computation. It consisted of an infinite tape, a read/write head, and a set of rules that dictated how symbols were processed. The machine laid the foundation for modern computational science. Turing's goal was to answer the Entscheidungsproblem, a question about whether all mathematical statements could be algorithmically proven. His answer was revolutionary. Some problems are inherently unsolvable by machines, a concept that reshaped the boundaries of logic and computation.
Turing had entered that stage of his life when his contributions would greatly affect the fate of World War II. His vision was way ahead of its time as he imagined and theorized machines that could think on their own and solve real-world problems even before the first computer was built!
Machines, War, and the Birth of Artificial Intelligence
Being one of the leading mathematicians in Britain, Turing was brought in for Britain's top codebreaking project at Bletchley Park. He was made to sign a confidentiality letter and was given the mission to crack the German Enigma machine, a cypher system so complex, it was believed to be unbreakable, giving Nazi Germany an upper hand in the war. And Alan Turing delivered!
Turing developed the Bombe, an electromechanical device that could test thousands of Enigma settings simultaneously, much better and faster than the Polish 'Bomba Kryptologiczna', which was being used till then. By the end of the war, more than 200 bombes had been installed. But Turing's mind didn't stop even after the war was over. At the National Physical Laboratory, he designed the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), one of the first stored-program computers. Later, at the University of Manchester, he worked on the Manchester Mark I, contributing to both hardware and software development.
In 1950, Turing himself posed one of the greatest questions at that time, Can Machines Think?? To answer it, he proposed the Turing Test, wherein a human judge would talk to a machine and a human via text. If both gave similar answers and the judge couldn't differentiate who he/she was talking to, the machine was said to exhibit intelligent behaviour. Notably, the CAPTCHA test used today to determine whether the user is a human or a computer is a reversed form of the Turing Test.
During the last years of his life, he also ventured into Mathematical Biology, where he was keen to explore how patterns formed in nature, like stripes on zebras or spirals on seashells, called morphogenesis. His curiosity was limited because of the lack of artificial intelligence and computational logic at that time, which forced him to predict these patterns using linear approximation by hand.
Death of the Genius: Tragedy and Legacy
Despite his monumental contributions to science and the war effort, Alan Turing's life ended on a tragic note. The world he lived in wasn't as modern as it is today. Alan Turing was homosexual, and homosexuality was a severe crime all over the world at that time. Following the advice of his brother and lawyer, Turing pleaded guilty and did not defend himself much. He was given the option of imprisonment or chemical castration, wherein he would be injected with synthetic oestrogen for a course of one year. He chose the latter. Besides this harsh punishment, his security clearance for his government work was withdrawn. He was also denied entry to the USA, but was free to visit other European countries. Nevertheless, and surprisingly, Alan Turing didn't feel bad about all this. It is said that he was optimistic about completing his punishment and lived his isolated life happily.
On the fateful day of 8th June 1954, he was found lying dead in his bed by his maid with an apple with one bite placed on the table beside him. The postmortem report revealed that he had died of cyanide poisoning the previous day, and it was seen as suicide. However, there are different theories regarding his death, from foul play to accidental inhalation of cyanide. Whatever the reason may be, the world has lost a mathematical and Computing gem who would have revolutionized the computing world had he lived a bit longer.
For decades, the work of this genius was largely hidden, thanks to the private letter he had signed. He remains and still remains to be unknown to the general public. In 2009, the British government issued a formal apology, and in 2013, Queen Elizabeth II granted him a posthumous royal pardon. The Alan Turing Law, passed in 2017, also extended pardons to thousands of others convicted under similar laws at that time. He also appears on the UK 50 banknote, and the prestigious Turing Award, often called the Nobel Prize in computing, bears his name.
But beyond the accolades, Turing's story reminds us that, however intelligent a person may be and whatever contributions the person makes to humanity, big or small, if the person dares to think differently, society won't hold back from punishing him/her.