I recently viewed the movie, The Imitation Game, based on Alan Turing’s life and his code cracking work during World War II. Some people who actually worked at the code breaking center, Blechley Park during the war, felt it was a pretty good representation of what actually happened and how the German codes were broken. That resulted in the loss of almost 800 U-boats and more than16,000 German submariners. It would have been very distracting to portray Turing as he really was, and even his girlfriend, Joan. Read on.
From a teacher’s point of view, there can’t be a more unlikely hero than the unruly, slovenly, inattentive, copy blotting Alan Turing as a child. However outrageous his behavior may have been, there were teachers who recognized the potential of this young genius and by the time he completed his secondary school, he was certainly an academic and a sports hero. Today, he is recognized as Sherborne School’s, most illustrious and heroic graduate. He has been recognized as one of the 100 most important Britons of all time.
So how did Alan Turing get from slovenly troublesome kid to school hero and eventually hero of the world? Well, the school began to take notice when they returned from an excursion to find that Turing had constructed a working Foucault pendulum hanging in a stairwell. They had already found that Turing, always definite loner, was a talented long distance runner. It is true that his constant mathematizing got on the nerves of at least one of his classics teachers who exclaimed, “I smell mathematics in this room, someone get me some disinfectant!” And he was quite serious. However, as Turing’s incredible genius began to show, the attitude changed from disgust to admiration and from concern to praise.
Part of this change was a result of a change in Turing. A new student arrived, a brilliant student, somebody Turing found he could admire and want to befriend. He was a year ahead of Turing and he was very talented in mathematics, and as a matter of fact, in everything else including clean-cut appearance. Turing cleaned up his act (never in his life, fully – even in adulthood he often kept his trousers up with a string!) and tried his best to emulate his perfect friend, Christopher Morcom. Turing’s dress and behavior became almost acceptable.
In his graduating year, Morcom was accepted as a student at Cambridge University. Turing applied and he was almost accepted at Cambridge, even though he was a year away from graduating from secondary school! He wanted to be with the very smart and very cool Morcom.
Unknown to Turing, his hero was suffering from a nasty form of tuberculosis, which Morcom had contracted from cow’s milk as an infant. In his last term at Sherborne, Morcom suddenly died, to leave a totally distraught family and friend, Turing. As you can imagine, Morcom, or as Turing described it, his spirit, remained with Turing for the rest of his life.
In 1936, our hero was 24 and lying in the grass after a long run. He had completed a brilliant, but lonely career at Cambridge and was now a fellow. Turing’s dance with destiny began here, lying exhausted, when he decided to tackle the remaining problem posed by the great German mathematician David Hilbert in the year 1900. The problem dealt with decidability: does there exist an algorithm (look it up) that decides the validity of any first order formula? Have I lost you? Well maybe, because, except for a very small minority of you, it will not be an every day question and it really doesn’t matter to the likes of us. (It does matter to very high-flying mathematicians who deal in first order logic.) What does matter to us is that in the process of answering this question, Turing proposed a series of machines: Turing Machines, each of which would solve one aspect of the question through a single algorithm. He then proposed a machine, the Universal Turing Machine, which was capable of analyzing the results of all the Turing Machines. How each of them would function was described in detail and all were a figment of Alan Turing’s wonderful imagination. Though never built, the Universal Turing Machine is recognized by a large majority of computer scientists as the progenitor of the modern computer including the binary system.
Did the world roar with applause when the article was published? Not quite. Only two mathematicians asked for copies of the paper, and one was a guy Turing worked with at Cambridge. It did get the attention of a mathematician who suggested that Turing should pursue a PhD at Princeton Universty in the US. This he did, and in 2 years, he completed it and got seriously interested in deciphering codes.
Back in Cambridge, it was now 1938 and war clouds were visible to all who would see. Turing was asked to join a course in code decryption in his spare time. He was fascinated and soon became, at age 26, a leader. The war began for Britain on September 3, 1939 and on September 4, Turing was on a train with his group of code breakers disguised as ‘Captain Ridley’s hunting party’, to the wartime decryption center at Blechley Park north of London.
Here he took on the most difficult task, decoding the German Naval Enigma code version, which the Nazi’s used to communicate with their U-boats. This code was so complicated that it was considered unbreakable. Turing accepted the challenge and soon, after incredibly complicated approaches, was successful in cracking the code (and then each time the code was made even more complicated). This allowed us to know just where the U-boats were situated in the Atlantic. The hunters became the hunted. Allied shipping losses dropped almost immediately but right to the end of the war the Germans couldn’t believe that the code could be cracked. They lost 793 U-boats but they suspected spies! Turing secretly became a huge hero within the service and was, very secretly, awarded the Order of the British Empire after the war.
Turing did all this, but he was a pretty strange character, still holding his trousers up with a string and wearing his pajamas under his sports coat. He also was a bit paranoid and locked his coffee mug to a radiator. He also refused to fix his bike chain (so no one would want to steal his bike). He would count the revolutions until the chain was ready to come off, stop and adjust the chain, over and over again. When he thought that the German’s would invade Britain, he took all of his savings out of the bank, converted them to silver bars and, in front of the local villagers, rolled them into the woods in an old baby buggy and buried them. Years later, 3 times (!) he tried to find them, and strangely enough, they weren’t there. His odd burying behavior alerted the police who took him into custody, but they had a special number to call if any of the Blechley Hall people came to their attention. It was Winston Churchill’s office. Turing was released very politely.
After the war, Alan Turing figured in the development of several early and very large versions of computers. His ideas led him to be on BBC radio discussing his, later to be justified but at the time a bit crazy ideas, particularly about artificial intelligence (AI). He proposed the Turing Test for AI and predicted that a computer would pass the test in 50 years. In this, he was wrong. Now in his 30’s, Turing was still a marathoner, running 20 miles or more to meetings and was preparing for the Olympics (his time was within a few minutes of Olympic Gold) when he tripped and permanently injured himself.
He was very much a loner, though he did settle down and actually bought a house. Turing was also gay. At the time, however, the laws against homosexuality were brutal. (The same laws that sent Oscar Wilde to prison in the 1800’s.) When he called police to investigate a break-in, they instead, arrested him for homosexual activities. In court, he chose chemical castration over jail time.
He felt that the treatment had destroyed his ability to think at the same level as before, and at the age of just 41, Alan Turing took his own life by biting into an apple laced with cyanide. What great things might have come from that marvelous mind in the life of which he was deprived. The anti-gay laws were repealed in 1967 but it wasn’t until the mid 70’s when the veil of secrecy over Turing’s World War II heroism was lifted. If he didn’t win the war, he at least shortened it.
No, the Apple Computer logo – the apple with a bite out of it - is not a nod to Turing …… or so they say.
