Alan Turing, the father of the computer

The Notepad of Michael the Great
Today it is a UK glory. Times included him in the list of the hundred most influential people of the twentieth century. After a popular petition, in 2009 Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologized to his compatriots for the judicial martyrdom that was inflicted on him. At the request of the scientific community, in 2013 Queen Elizabeth granted him a “posthumous state pardon”. We are talking about Alan Mathison Turing, the pioneer of the information revolution. In “The Imitation Game” (2014), the film directed by Morden Tyldum who made him known to the general public, he is a nonconformist and asocial genius to the limits of autism. Much like the Nobel Prize Winner in Economics John Nash from “A Beautiful Mind” (2001). And an infallible cinematic cliche, tailor-made for the night of the Oscars.
Alan was born on June 23, 1912 in a London suburb, where his parents had just moved. Julius, his father, was a senior administrative official in the province of Madras in British India. Sara, the mother, was the daughter of a railway engineer of the empire. In 1918 he was enrolled at Hazelhurst, a boarding school where the little pupil immediately showed a marked inclination for numbers and natural sciences. At eight he begins to sketch a treatise on the microscope. Poor in team games, he prefers to devote himself to chess. In a letter to John, his elder brother, he complains that the algebra teacher “conveyed the wrong idea of ​​what is really meant by x”. In 1926 and in Sherborne, a prestigious private institution in Dorset.
Sherborne was the setting for “The Loom of Youth”, published in 1917. The novel’s author, former student Alec Waugh, made no secret of the homosexual relationships that took place within its walls . Alan reads it when he had already discovered he was attracted to his peers, even though he tried to suppress any temptation with grueling cross-country marathons. He was especially fascinated by Christopher Mortom, his closest friend. With him she enjoyed creating codes with the template, a carved shape which, placed on the page of a book, formed abstruse sentences. With him she discussed physics, chemistry and astronomy, their latest passion. To make a good impression on him, he had calculated the value of the “Greek p” up to the thirty-sixth decimal. Christopher was also the expert pianist who had introduced him to the world of classical music, and with his refined tastes he had educated him in sociability and good manners. In poor health, he died of tuberculosis in 1930.
Alan is devastated by his loss: “I blessed the earth he trod – a desperate confess to his mother – and I feel that they met him again somewhere […]. He made all the other [friends] look terribly ordinary. ” Though heartbroken, he continues to pursue his scientific interests with commitment. He studies German and the fundamentals of quantum mechanics. He is awarded the “Edward VI” gold medal for mathematics and a scholarship to the University of Cambridge. After graduating from high school, he follows a training course at the London barracks in Knightsbridge, where he is promoted to reserve officer chevrons.
In the fall of 1931 and at King’s College. In the sanctuary of Anglo-Saxon liberalism, homosexuality, although illegal, was widely tolerated. And it is there that Alan decides to go to bed for the first time with a classmate, James Atkins. The law known as the “Labouchere Amendment” (1885) punished with severe penalties the “acts of serious obscenity” between consenting adults of the same sex (it will be abolished in 1967). Perhaps also for this reason, as well as a congenital shyness, he kept away from the effervescent worldliness of the Cantabrigese salons and the Bloomsbury club. Just as he disdained the rites of the Ten Club or the Massinger Society, whose members debated philosophy until late at night.
Yet the doors of those temples of aesthetic and intellectual pleasure were not closed to mathematicians: Godfred Harold Hardy (also homosexual) and Bertrand Russel moved in the same milieu as Edward Morgan Forster and John Maynard Keynes. Except that they both possessed an appeal that Turing couldn’t compete with. So he stood on the sidelines, and read: magazines like “New Statesman” and books like “Erewhon” (1871) by Samuel Butler, in which machines seize power and subdue men. However, he was not insensitive to the social struggles and pacifist ideals of the time. He did not hide his sympathy for the ideas of Arthur Cecil Pigou, the standard-bearer of a more equitable distribution of wealth. And in 1933 he mentions to his mother his intention to visit the Soviet Union: “I joined an organization – he confides – called the Antimilitarist Council, rather communist on the political level. The program mainly envisages organizing strikes by workers in the ammunition and chemical weapons factories, as the government prepares to go to war ”.
In 1934 he graduated with honors, and the following year he became a fellow of King’s. Reflecting on the question posed by David Hilbert at the beginning of the century and reformulated in the twenties, Alan lays the foundations of the innovation that most marked the twentieth century. He therefore imagines a machine capable not only of performing numerical calculations, but any operation that can be described by means of an algorithm, that is, a succession of instructions that can be executed automatically. In other words, he imagines a machine (hardware) capable of decoding and simulating instructions, ie programs (software), to have the “universal machine”. And the computers on our desks are exactly as Alan had thought them: machines that, like all machines, only know how to do a finite number of operations, but that do the right ones.
The Turing Machine, as it will be called later, is exactly that: a machine capable of emulating any program that is given to it. In the spring of 1936 he delivered the essay “On Computable Numbers” to Max Newman, his mentor at King’s. From him she learns that Alonzo Church had reached the same conclusions as him, albeit through a completely different and less sophisticated procedure. For Alan it is a shock. But a few weeks later he was invited by Church for a PhD at Princeton University, of which he was a lecturer. In September he embarks in Southampton and sets sail for America.
Despite the coldness with which he is initially greeted, his experience at the Institute for Advanced Study will be positive. Founded in 1932, the Institute had attracted the brightest minds in Europe fleeing the Nazis: from Hermann Weyl to Einstein, from John von Neumann to the prodigy of logic Kurt Godel. Despite his shy nature, Alan participated in sports activities on campus. His hobby was running and, encouraged by good performances, he even caresses the idea of ​​competing in the Olympics. His talent is noticed by von Neumann, who offers him to continue his research for another year. Turing agrees, but takes a long vacation in Cambridge where he gets acquainted with Ludwig Wittgenstein, then a professor at Trinity College.
Back in Princeton, he works on codes and deciphering systems. After his doctorate, von Neumann offers him to become his assistant. Alan refuses, and in the fall of 1938 in New York he boarded the Normandie steamship to reach England. He had with him a couple of bags and a brown paper bag, in which was wrapped an electric multiplier built with his hands. Although rudimentary, he was able to encrypt messages by multiplying binary numbers together. The idea anticipated that cryptographic method that protects our credit card information when we shop on the Internet.
War with Germany was now imminent, and Turing does not hesitate to serve the Crown. He was not a fanatical patriot, but he hated Hitler. On September 4, 1939, he arrives at Bletchley Park, a monumental mansion located about fifty miles north-west of London. Together with a team of mathematicians, he is assigned the task of cracking the Enigma code. Its inventor, Arthur Scherbius, had patented it in 1918 to sell to bankers and businessmen. Powered by Third Reich technicians for military purposes, it was contained in a tiny wooden box, with a standard typewriter keyboard. To violate it, however, it was necessary to deal with about two hundred million possible combinations.
Fortunately, Turing didn’t have to start from scratch. In fact, as early as 1932 three mathematicians from the University of Poznan – Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zigalski and Jerzy Rozyck – understood that if the code was generated by one machine, it could be decoded by another machine. Alan immediately sets to work with Joan Clarke, her main collaborator (with her he will have a fleeting engagement). On March 18, 1940 “Victory” was installed in Bletchey, nicknamed Bomba for its constant ticking. It was a model three hundred thousand times faster than the one made by the Poles, and had cost one-tenth the price of a Lancaster bomber. “Agnus Dei”, the second Bomb, was placed in August. While the Battle of Britain was raging, the Luftwaffe transmissions were now regularly intercepted;
It is in Bletchey that Turing becomes legendary for his quirks and slovenliness. He rode his bicycle with a gas mask to protect himself from pollen, went to the office dressed in pajamas, chained his teacup to a radiator pipe, used a tie to tighten his trousers. Oddities aside, Turing and his hackers ante litteram were regarded by Winston Churchill as “goose that lays golden eggs that never cackle.” In May 1941 in Whiteall, the seat of government, they were awarded an honor and received a cash bonus. At that time they had already managed to decrypt the messages of the Kriegsmarine, neutralizing the attacks of the U-boat submarines on the British merchant ships that transported food and basic necessities. With the defeat of the “Atlantic wolves”,
Meanwhile, one of Turing’s assistants, telephone engineer Tommy Flowers, had begun designing a prototype of a digital electronic computer in the Dollis Hill laboratories. By January 1944 Colossus was already operational in Bletchey. In fact, it was gigantic: it was the size of a room and weighed a ton. By processing twenty-five thousand characters per second, it provided the Allies with valuable information about the enemy’s plans. By building the Colossus, the ancestor of Intel’s microprocessors, Flowers proved that it was possible to make the Turing Machine.
In 1946 John Womersley, head of the mathematics department of the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington, proposed to Turing to build the first multifunctional electronic computer. Alan doesn’t think twice, and in forty-eight pieces of paper with fifty-two graphs he explains his “electronic calculating machine” (ACE). The British government allocates £ 100,000 to finance the project. In the same year, von Neumann revealed to the American public that that machine (ENIAC) had already been built in Pennsylvania. In fact, it still lacked a cornerstone, Turing’s stored program, which will then be fed into a new computer (EDVAC). From that moment on, the Hungarian physicist will be incensed as the “father of the computer”. Disappointed by von Neumann’s ease and by the hostility shown to him by the director of the NPL, Sir Charles Darwin (grandson of the theorist of evolution), Alan in 1948 took a sabbatical in Cambridge. He enrolls in the Moral Science Club, has an affair with Neville Johnson, a King’s student, plays chess with Pigou, deals with neurology and physiology. He finally decides to move to the University of Manchester, where Max Newman had called him. In May 1948, before resigning from the Teddington Laboratory, he writes a report entitled “Intelligent Machines”. Trashed by Sir Darwin as a schoolchild’s homework, he anticipated the concept of a generic algorithm, which will find application in financial forecasting and in the production of medicines. Sir Charles Darwin (grandson of the theoretician of evolution), Alan in 1948 takes a sabbatical in Cambridge. He enrolls in the Moral Science Club, has an affair with Neville Johnson, a King’s student, plays chess with Pigou, deals with neurology and physiology. He finally decides to move to the University of Manchester, where Max Newman had called him. In May 1948, before resigning from the Teddington Laboratory, he writes a report entitled “Intelligent Machines”. Trashed by Sir Darwin as a schoolchild’s homework, he anticipated the concept of a generic algorithm, which will find application in financial forecasting and in the production of medicines. Sir Charles Darwin (grandson of the theoretician of evolution), Alan in 1948 takes a sabbatical in Cambridge. He enrolls in the Moral Science Club, has an affair with Neville Johnson, a King’s student, plays chess with Pigou, deals with neurology and physiology. He finally decides to move to the University of Manchester, where Max Newman had called him. In May 1948, before resigning from the Teddington Laboratory, he writes a report entitled “Intelligent Machines”. Trashed by Sir Darwin as a schoolchild’s homework, he anticipated the concept of a generic algorithm, which will find application in financial forecasting and in the production of medicines. plays chess with Pigou, deals with neurology and physiology. He finally decides to move to the University of Manchester, where he had called him Max Newman. In May 1948, before resigning from the Teddington Laboratory, he writes a report entitled “Intelligent Machines”. Trashed by Sir Darwin as a schoolchild’s homework, he anticipated the concept of a generic algorithm, which will find application in financial forecasting and in the production of medicines. plays chess with Pigou, deals with neurology and physiology. He finally decides to move to the University of Manchester, where he had called him Max Newman. In May 1948, before resigning from the Teddington Laboratory, he writes a report entitled “Intelligent Machines”. Trashed by Sir Darwin as a schoolchild’s homework, he anticipated the concept of a generic algorithm, which will find application in financial forecasting and in the production of medicines.
In October 1950, Mind magazine published “Calculating Machines and Intelligence”, Turing’s most subversive and most controversial text. In 1936 he had proved that a machine cannot decide whether a proposition is true or false. Now he wanted to show that, if it can mimic human behavior, the machine “thinks.” To this end, he invents the “imitation game” (which gives the film its title), better known as the Turing test: “The claim that machines cannot make mistakes [in the imitation game] seems strange […] . It is argued that the interrogator could distinguish the machine from man simply by posing a number of arithmetic problems to both of them. The machine would be exposed for its tremendous accuracy. The answer to this is simple. The machine, programmed to play the game, he would not try to give the correct answer […]. He would deliberately introduce errors, in a way studied on purpose to confuse the interrogator ”. The frontiers of artificial intelligence (an expression coined in 1956 by the American mathematician John McCarthy) were now open. According to Turing, at least a century had to pass before a computer could pass his test. On 7 June 2014, the day of the sixtieth anniversary of his death, the “Eugene” computer passed him, albeit partially, in the London headquarters of the Royal Society. at least a century had to pass before a computer could pass its test. On 7 June 2014, the day of the sixtieth anniversary of his death, the “Eugene” computer passed him, albeit partially, in the London headquarters of the Royal Society. at least a century had to pass before a computer could pass its test. On 7 June 2014, the day of the sixtieth anniversary of his death, the “Eugene” computer passed him, albeit partially, in the London headquarters of the Royal Society.
In Manchester Turing meets a nineteen-year-old boy, Arnold Murray, on Oxford Street. He offers him lunch and invites him to his Wilmslow home for the weekend. They sleep together, and the next morning Alan notices that money was missing from his wallet. Arnold protests his innocence. After a few days, Alan’s apartment is burglarized. Turing reports the theft to the police. Arnold confesses that it was committed by a friend of his, Harry. When questioned by the agents, the latter says that Arnold had been in bed with the English mathematician. The agents return to Wilmslow and, instead of arresting the thief, arrest the robbed on the charge listed in the Labouchere amendment. Turing is tried and sentenced to one year of probation, provided that he undergoes a course of estrogen-based treatments to “recover from his illness”. The side effects of chemical castration will be humiliating. The agile runner soon becomes fat and his breasts grow. It is also considered a danger to the security of the state. In 1951, Guy Burgess and Donald McLean fled to Moscow, and Cambridge had been suspected of being the brain of a spy network since the 1930s, when Turing was studying there.
While kept under close surveillance by the secret services, his dedication to science remains unchanged. And he becomes even more cheeky in the “adventure sagas” of him, in Norway and Paris. On the morning of June 8, 1954, the maid finds him dead in her bed, next to an apple with a bite. Later it is known that it contained cyanide. In two days the investigation is closed. The verdict: “Suicide from mental imbalance”. On June 12, Turing’s body is cremated in Woking, Surrey. Only in 1977 New Scientist will publish an essay by Brian Rendell, a professor at Newcastle University, which did justice to the role he had played in the Second World War and to his figure as a scientist. Since then, Turing’s fame has grown to such an extent that the famous Apple logo has been interpreted as a tribute to his memory. Steve Jobs has never confirmed it, but for other Cupertino managers it alludes to Isaac Newton’s apple. Maybe, but then why does that logo have a bite