Alan Turing OBE FRS died 65 years ago on June 7, 1954. He may not be a household name, but he was a pioneering mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. He played pivotal roles in the development of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.
Turing played a critical role in cracking intercepted German coded messages during WWII, which enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis in many crucial engagements, including the Battle of the Atlantic. It has been estimated that this work (by Turing and his colleagues) shortened the war in Europe by more than two years and saved over 14 million lives.
Despite these monumental accomplishments, he was never fully recognized in his home country during his lifetime, due to his homosexuality, which was then a crime in the UK.
Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts. He accepted chemical castration treatment, with Diethylstilbestrol (DES), as an alternative to prison. Turing died in 1954, 16 days before his 42nd birthday, from cyanide poisoning. His death was pronounced as a suicide, but there is some evidence that it could have been an accidental poisoning.
The NYT, notable for writing obituaries of notable men and women, never wrote his obituary — until this week, accompanied by an apology.
From the NYT obituary :
On June 7, 1954, Alan Turing, a British mathematician who has since been acknowledged as one the most innovative and powerful thinkers of the 20th century — sometimes called the progenitor of modern computing — died as a criminal, having been convicted under Victorian laws as a homosexual and forced to endure chemical castration. Britain didn’t take its first steps toward decriminalizing homosexuality until 1967.
[…] the police were investigating a burglary at his home when he admitted to having had a physical relationship with a man named Arnold Murray. Murray told Turing that he knew the thief’s identity, and detectives, in their questioning, asked Turing about his relationship to Murray.
In March 1952, Turing and Murray were charged with “gross indecency,” and both pleaded guilty in court. Murray was given a conditional discharge, but Turing was ordered to undergo chemical castration by taking doses of the female hormone estrogen to reduce sex drive. Two years later, the motive for his apparent suicide, at age 41, remained unclear and left many questions.
Some Tributes
Here are some clips from the movie — The Imitation Game, based on the life of Alan Turing —
Other Contributions
When Turing was 39 years old in 1951, he turned to mathematical biology, finally publishing his masterpiece "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis" in January 1952. He was interested in morphogenesis, the development of patterns and shapes in biological organisms, such as the the existence of Fibonacci numbers in plant structures, such as the sunflower.
His work is considered ground-breaking and led to further research in explaining features such as the spots and stripes on the fur of cats, large and small and the growth of feathers, hair follicles, the branching pattern of lungs, and even the left-right asymmetry that puts the heart on the left side of the chest. en.wikipedia.org/…
www.brandeis.edu/… has a nice explanation of Morphogenesis, the biological process that causes an organism to develop its shape -
Turing was the first to offer an explanation of morphogenesis through chemistry. He theorized that identical biological cells differentiate and change shape through a process called intercellular reaction-diffusion. In this model, a system of chemicals react with each other and diffuse across a space — say between cells in an embryo. These chemical reactions need an inhibitory agent, to suppress the reaction, and an excitatory agent, to activate the reaction. This chemical reaction, diffused across an embryo, will create patterns of chemically different cells.
Imagine a field, with grass as dry as bone, teeming with grasshoppers. A small fire starts in one patch of the field and the grasshoppers hop away to avoid it. As the bugs hop, they perspire, wetting the grass along the way. The fire jumps to another part of the field, the grasshoppers hop away, creating another island of wet grass.
Now, picture an aerial view of this field — what was once a uniform plain is now spotted with patterns of burnt and unburned grass. This is Turing’s model of reaction-diffusion. The fire is the activator and the grasshoppers are the inhibitor. The reaction diffuses across a series of cells, activating some, inhibiting others and what was once identical is now different.
In 2012, MOSI (Museum of Science & Industry, Manchester), the Manchester Science Festival and The University of Manchester paid tribute to Turing in a citizen-science project to grow 3,000 sunflowers. Researchers collected data to put Turing's and other scientists' theories to the test. The findings were published in this paper.
Turing, Artificial Intelligence and Chess
In 1948, Turing and Champernowne, then his colleague at King's College, Cambridge, wrote a program called Turochamp (also known as Turing's paper machine) that could play chess using rules and look-ahead search algorithms familiar to most software engineers today. The program was too complex to run on the ACE or other primitive computers of the time. The program was not run on an actual computer before Turing's death in 1954.
Turing’s interest was not just computer based chess and game playing; it was the entire new concept and theoretical foundation of machines (that did not exist yet) that could perform tasks only humans have performed throughout history.
Recognition
Turing has been honored in many ways since his death. See en.wikipedia.org/… for a comprehensive list.
In 2009, following an Internet campaign, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for "the appalling way he was treated". Queen Elizabeth II granted Turing a posthumous pardon in 2013. The Alan Turing law is now an informal term for a 2017 law in the United Kingdom that retroactively pardoned men cautioned or convicted under historical legislation that outlawed homosexual acts.
Most of us who have studied computer science are familiar with the Turing machine and the Turing test.
Since 1966, the Turing Award has been given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery for technical or theoretical contributions to the computing community. It is widely considered to be the computing world's highest honor, equivalent to the Nobel Prize.
In 1999, Time magazine named Turing as one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th century and stated, "The fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine."
In 2002, Turing was ranked twenty-first on the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons following a UK-wide vote.
Epilogue
Hats off to Alan Turing and we are truly sorry for calling ourselves civilized when we commit such heinous crimes against those who serve humanity far beyond the call of duty. We have made some progress on the LGBTQ front but we are still far from having the right to call ourselves civilized. Ignorance, fear, hatred and bigotry still rule many hearts and are often used as weapons to divide the population.
RIP wherever you are.
Now raise your hand, if you have ever written a program for a Turing machine.
Further Reading
- en.wikipedia.org/…
- Reconstructing Turing's "Paper Machine", Friedel and Kasparov,— en.chessbase.com/…
- Faster than thought, Alan Turing — docs.google.com/…
- Understanding Pattern Formation During Morphogenesis — sitn.hms.harvard.edu/…
- The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis, Alan Turing — www.dna.caltech.edu/…
- Turing’s Sunflowers project — www.manchester.ac.uk/…
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Novel Fibonacci and non-Fibonacci structure in the sunflower: results of a citizen science experiment — royalsocietypublishing.org/...