Marking 50 Years Since Alan Turing's Death

erroneous writes "Today is the 50th anniversary of the death of Alan Turing: mathematician, code breaker, and computer pioneer. He was today commemorated in his home city of Manchester, UK." Here are stories at the BBC and at The Register.

Comments

Re:Killed by the society he saved.

[Raven42rac]

From Dailyrotten:
June 7 1954 Despondent over court-ordered estrogen treatments to cure his homosexuality, Alan Turing commits suicide by consuming an apple laced with cyanide. Turing is considered the founder of modern computing, a pioneer in the field of Artificial Intelligence, and a crucial member of the team that cracked Germany's Enigma cipher in World War II.

Tony Sale

[Richard_L_James]

Tony Sale's webpage - WW II Codes and Ciphers is well worth a visit also.

A truly brilliant man

[ErichTheWebGuy]

Here is another interesting link:

http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathemati cians/Turing.html

Not only did he (amongst others) crack the German Luftwaffe enigma codes, but those of the German navy, which were far more difficult. His work was pioneering on several fronts. Surely the world is a far better place for his having lived in it.

German Enigma

[acceber]

Here is a link for Alan Turing and his work on ciphering and enigma machines.

Re:Killed by the society he saved.

[RabidOverYou]

At first, they gave (male) homosexuals testosterone. After all, they were "too girly", right? Well shit, that just turned them into raging aggressive horny homosexuals. So, since that didn't work, they thought "what the heck, let's do the opposite". They had no clue, but kept experimenting. Never seemed to cross their minds just to leave the poor guys alone.

Not really *but*

[BlightThePower]

whenever talk of WW2 codebreaking comes up, I do wish the Polish were more often given proper respect for their contribution, in particular the work of Marian Rejewski. He was the first to figure out the details of the commerical (class D) engima machine and was instrumental in constructing the first code breaking machines ('Bombas', hence the British and American use of the similar term, 'Bombes')

Interestingly Rejewski made it first to France (where his work on Enigma continued) and then to Britain. Where his talents were wasted and he was apparently shocked after the war to learn what had gone on at Bletchley. After the war he went back to Poland and worked in a factory.

It seems cryptanalysts often got the short end of the stick, alas.

Re:Not really *but*

[connorbd]

Yeah, they kinda did give Rejewski the shaft. In The Code Book by Simon Singh they tell his side of the story -- certainly Turing deserves all the credit he got, but the British shuffled him off into a minor codebreaking job nowhere near Bletchley.

Highly recommended book, that. Lots of stuff, not just on Enigma and World War II, but a long way before and after, even including some interesting stuff on Champollion and Ventris (Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mycenaean Greek writing)... did you know RSA was invented independently in the UK but the discoverer couldn't talk about it until long after it had been reinvented in the US?

Turing's AI studies probably created computers...

[Angry Black Man]

...as we know them today. Turing believed that machines could be created that would mimic the processes of the human brain. He acknowledged the difficulty people would have accepting a machine to rival their own intelligence, a problem that still plagues artificial intelligence today.

He likened new technology devices such as cameras and microphones to parts of the human body and his views often landed him in heated debates with other scientists.

Turing believed an intelligent machine could be created by following the blueprints of the human brain. He wrote a paper in 1950 describing what is now known as the Turing Test.

The test consisted of a person asking questions via keyboard to both a person and an intelligent machine. He believed that if computer's answers could not be distinguished from those of the person after a reasonable amount of time, the machine was somewhat intelligent. This test has become a standard measure of the artificial intelligence community.

Insightful? Bah. Of course Insightful != Factual

[Zen Programmer]

The real story

Re:Overestimating his contributions

[RedWizzard]

I doubt it. No Turing, no cracking of Enigma.

And you're basing that on what? Turing wasn't the only person working on Enigma. Does the name Marian Rejewski mean anything to you? He was the Pole who figured out how Enigma worked and how to crack it. He did as much for the Allies as Turing. In fact Turing's job was to find a second method of attacking Enigma incase the Germans changed the procedures that allowed Rejewski's method to work. There is no evidence to suggest that only Turing was capable of figuring out that method. Other people had performed similar feats.

Even with Turing's method not every message was broken (or even intercepted). When the Germans changed procedures and even the design of Engima (in the case of the 4-rotor Naval version) the Allies often lost the ability to break the codes for weeks or months at a time. Often it was captured codebooks that allowed the codes to be read. Without Turing's work other ways to gain the required intelligence would have been found.

Even if the Allies had of lost the ability to read Enigma-coded messages entirely it is not clear that it would have lost them the war. It's extremely difficult to assess these sorts of scenarios, of course, but don't forget that Enigma intelligence was only one small part of the intelligence available to the Allies.

No Enigma cracking, we lose the Battle of the Atlantic.

Most Enigma cracking during the Battle of the Atlantic was based on captured codebooks, up until the start of February 1942. That is when the German navy switched to the 4-rotor Engima. Little progress was made against that until the capture of the new codebooks from U-559 at the end of October. Bletchley wasn't regularly cracking Enigma again until mid-December. So for 10.5 months during the most intense period of the Battle of the Atlantic no Enigma intelligence was available. Cracking Enigma was a big factor in winning the Battle of the Atlantic but it was not the only factor (radar was another for example), and it is not clear that we would have lost the battle without Engima.

Loebner Prize is Turing test instantiated

[wombatmobile]

"In 1990 Hugh Loebner agreed with The Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies to underwrite a contest designed to implement the Turing Test. Dr. Loebner pledged a Grand Prize of $100,000 and a Gold Medal for the first computer whose responses were indistinguishable from a human's. Each year an annual prize of $2000 and a bronze medal is awarded to the most human computer. The winner of the annual contest is the best entry relative to other entries that year, irrespective of how good it is in an absolute sense."

Further information on the development of the Loebner Prize and the reasons for its existence is available at Loebner's web site.

Re:A bit different view

[Eiki]

Probably not. However, at the risk of being hounded to death myself as a Homophobe, and meaning no respect to the very great Turing or to any other homosexuals that suffered public disapproval or worse at this time, I suggest that the CIA would not have been entirely wrong in finding such a situation worrisome. It is now well known that the KGB emphasized recruitment of gays with sensitive knowledge, believing that they were consumed with bitterness toward their own cultures (and not without reason, either. Gays were treated even worse behind the Iron Curtain, but that was probably not known in the west at the time) and ready to defect. Indeed, 3 of the Cambridge ring were homo- or bi-sexual, as were many other burnt spies of the time. Denying security clearance to gays on such grounds was common enough for Clinton to issue an executive order banning the practice in 1995.

Note: there is no evidence to indicate that Turing ever worked as an enemy spy, or that the CIA was involved in his death or was even worried about his loyalty. I am only suggesting that, in this case, the CIA would not have been acting out of pure bigotry, but out of a somewhat reasonable fear of exposure.