June, the month Alan Turing was born and died. This brilliant man was born on 23 June 1912 and died on 7 June 1954, therefore, it is worth remembering one of the men to whom England, but also the world owes so much.
Fig.1- Alan Turing is the father of computer science. One of the main personalities was essential to decipher the code of the Nazi enigma. (photograph taken from: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2870499)
He started to learn Latin, when he went to primary school, in St. Michael’s, where the headmistress said she had many smart children, but that Turing was simply a genius. when he was a little boy, he had a passion to read nature study books. He would write a book called “About a Microscope” when he was still a child. Soon it would become unpopular at school, he didn't have the same interests as the other kids, he preferred to play chess and spent a lot of time working out complicated chess problems, alone. In general, teachers would always accuse him of not putting enough energy into his tasks and to be impertinent. Later in his life, he would become a good runner. Since his childhood, he was interested in several areas of science, such as biology.
Alan attended the Sherborne Public School in Dorset where a friend of his parents was a science master. But things at the new school didn't go well, even the mathematics was not very good. The report said: “He spends a great deal of time in investigations in advanced mathematics to the neglect of his elementary work” (Cawthorne, 2019). Science classes ran the same way. Behold, a turning point later took place and young Turing was acclaimed as a genius by his math teacher, Mr. Randolph, after receiving the school’s Plumptre Prize for mathematics, and after having presented an algebraic exposition that his teacher thought he would have copied from a book, but that in reality, he would have worked from the first principles. It was in Sherborne that he realized that he was attracted to individuals of the same sex. It was here too, that he nurtured worm feelings by another student named Christopher Morcom with whom he shared an interest in science. This close relationship helped Turing to integrate into the school, Morcom played the piano and showed Turing classical music. Both boys finished high school, and Morcom received a scholarship to the Trinity College in Cambridge. Later Morcom died of tuberculosis and Turing lost his only and great friend.
Fig.2- King's College, Cambridge, university where Alan Turing graduated (Photograph taken by Hugo Vaz Pontes Mestre)
Cambridge University was a paradise for mathematicians, Turing would make some friends there while studying at King's College. homosexuality was generally accepted there. It was also in Cambridge that it became politicized and had its political phase, very close to communist ideals joining an organization called "Anti-War Council", while Fascism and Nazism grew throughout Europe. His graduation was in 1934, with a £ 200 research award from King's College. He progressed with the Central Limit Theorem, and he received another prize of £ 300 per year, for three years.
Turing had a vision of a machine by going one step at the time along with a series of simple operations, like nowadays computers. He demonstrated that his machine could compute every little thing that could be computed. Turing’s Universal Machine would never be conceived beyond the plan, but it would be the precursor of computers as we know them today. After he wrote his results Turing travels to America to do a Ph.D. at Princeton. At Princeton he felt at home, Princeton had been created as an image of Cambridge or Oxford. 1932, Princeton had top scientists and mathematicians who had escaped the Nazis, Albert Einstein, John Von Neumann are both good examples.
Codebreaker played a crucial role during the second world war, with the outbreak of the war it would be necessary to recruit good codebreakers. When Turing returned from Princeton, he immediately became involved in the war, when he returned to England. His duty in this war, together with Gordon Welchman would be to break the code of the German Enigma machine. The Enigma machine, inside a wooden case, eleven inches wide and six inches high, had a typewriter keyboard with a standard German layout. The machine could encrypt messages making life very difficult for the allies, Germans knew since the first world war, how important it was to have a secure communications service. The way it worked would be, then, after each card was encoded it could only be decoded by someone who had a set of identical discs because to encode them only these sets of discs were used on the Enigma machine. From the moment the codes started to be broken, this made it possible for the British to target their fighters against German bombers. After, they sent a messages to cancel England invasion plans. There would always be a risk that the Germans would perceive that the English had broken the code. With the entry of the United States in the second world war, all the work developed by Turing and his colleagues to break German codes was used by Americans to break Japanese codes.
Then Colossus appeared, intending to locate Tunny machines code wheels were at the starting point of the message, this happened by trying all possible combinations. The first code broken by Colossus was when it gave the allies privileged information about the German plans before D-day. the operation of the machine is similar to the first microprocessor created thirty years later.
In 1948, Alan Turing and David Champernowne wrote the first artificial intelligence program. Named Turonchamp would be a chess player algorithm.
Trying to answer the question “Can automatic calculating machines be said to think?” he unveiled the “Turing test”, or as he also called the imitation game. Two humans and a machine to be tested. After asking a series of questions one of the humans, the judge would have to decide which of the other two is the machine, the questioned human would do anything to help the judge, the machine would do anything to deceive him.
Turing's death raises several questions, however, for history, it would be a possible suicide.however, the chances of an accident or even murder will always be present.
Fig.3- Blue plaque in memory of Alan Turing, at Trumpington Street, Cambridge ((Photograph taken by Hugo Vaz Pontes Mestre).
What he gave the world, especially for math and computing was an invaluable source of knowledge. June is the appropriate month to celebrate his legacy.
Reference List:
Cannon, J., 2015. A Dictionary Of British History. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
Cawthorne, N., 2019. Alan Turing. 1st ed. London: Arcturus.
The Alan Turing Institute. 2020. University Of Cambridge. [online] Available at: <https://www.turing.ac.uk/collaborate-turing/current-partnerships-and-collaborations/university-cambridge> [Accessed 16 June 2020].
Turing, A. and Copeland, B., 2004. The Essential Turing. Oxford: Clarendon Press.