Alan Turing famous quotes

• “Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.”

• “We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”

• “A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.”

• “No, I’m not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I’m after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.”

• “Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity.”

• “I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.”

• “In the time of Galileo it was argued that the texts, ‘And the sun stood still … and hasted not to go down about a whole day’ (Joshua x. 13) and ‘He laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not move at any time’ (Psalm cv. 5) were an adequate refutation of the Copernican theory.”

• “Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.”

Sad ending of a computer genius

Alan Turing was arrested and came to trial in 1952, after the police learned of his sexual relationship with a young Manchester man. He made no serious denial or defense, since he was particularly concerned to be open about his sexuality. But he decided not to accept prison sentence and he rather agreed to receiving injections of oestrogen intended to neutralize his libido.

His work on the morphogenetic theory continued. He developed his theory of pattern formation out of instability into the realm of spherical objects, such as the Radiolaria, and also on the cylinder, as a model of plant stems. He set as a particular goal the explanation for the appearance of the Fibonacci numbers in the leaf patterns of plants. Besides this he refreshed his youthful interest in quantum physics, studying the problem of wave-function reduction in quantum mechanics.

Statue of Turing by Stephen Kettle at Bletchley Park, commissioned by the American philanthropist Sidney E Frank.

Since 1948, the conditions of the Cold War, and the alliance with the United States, meant that known homosexuals had become ineligible for security clearance. Turing, now therefore excluded, spoke bitterly of this to his onetime wartime colleague, now MI6 engineer Donald Bayley, but to no other personal friends. State security also seems the likely cause of what he described as another intense crisis in March 1953, involving police searching for a visiting Norwegian who had come to see him.

Eccentric, solitary, gloomy, vivacious, resigned, angry, eager, dissatisfied — these had always been his ever-varying characteristics, and despite the strength that he showed the world in coping with outrageous fortune, no-one could safely have predicted his future course.

He was found dead in his home on 8 June 1954. He had died the day before of cyanide poisoning, a half-eaten apple beside his bed. His mother believed he had accidentally ingested cyanide from his fingers after an amateur chemistry experiment, but it is more credible that he had committed a suicide. 

Turning as a pioneer of computers personal use

In May 1948, Newman offered Turing the post as Deputy Director of the computing laboratory at Manchester University.

Turing at Manchester could perhaps have led the world in software development. His partly explored ideas included the use of mathematical logic for program checking, implementing Church’s logical calculus on the machine, and other ideas which, combined with his massive knowledge of combinatorial and statistical methods, could have set the agenda in computer science for years ahead. This, however, he failed to do.

Instead, he revisited his 1939 calculation of the Riemann zeta-function with the use of the prototype computer; he pursued the question of computability within the algebra of group theory.

In 1950, there emerged a clear direction for new thought. Rather than return to classical mathematics, the novel potential of the computer still held his attention, and he became a pioneer of its personal use. For, as he settled in Manchester, buying his own first house at outlying Wilmslow, he had an entirely fresh field in view. It was what he described as the mathematical theory of morphogenesis: the theory of growth and form in biology. For him it was a return to a fundamental problem!

His first successful work on The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis was submitted as a paper that November 1951. Long overlooked, it was a founding paper of modern non-linear dynamical theory.

The world’s first demonstration of Turing’s computer principle

Turing developed during wartime a detailed computer scheme by using superior technology that was orientated to speed in every sense. This meant, in particular, implementing arithmetical functions by programming rather than by building in electronic components.

Turing’s use of the machine was visionary. He managed to make a computer able to switch at will from numerical work to algebra, codebreaking or file handling. This phase of Turing’s work resulted in creating Abbreviated Code Instructions which marked the beginning of programming languages.

The next period, from 1947 till 1948, Turing dedicated exclusively to new study, neither in mathematics nor technology but in neurology and physiology at Cambridge University. Meanwhile other computer projects at Cambridge and Manchester took the lead.

Newman – who was the first reader of On computable numbers – strongly promoted Turing’s principle of the stored-program computers. He conveyed basic principles to the leading radar engineer F. C. Williams, which resulted in the world’s first practical demonstration of Turing’s computer principle in June 1948.

Alan Turing : Concept of the universal machine

In 1938 Turing was offered a temporary post at Princeton by von Neumann but instead returned to Cambridge. He had no University lectureship; in the year 1938-9 he lived on his King’s College fellowship, as logician and number theorist. Unusually for a mathematician, he joined in Wittgenstein’s classes on the philosophy of mathematics. But also, secretly he worked part-time for the British cryptanalytic department, the so-called Government Code and Cypher School.

War crisis brought about a new ingredient in Alan Turing’s experience. The conjunction of Turing’s thoughts with the practicality of large-scale electronic machinery, arising from this technical U-boat Enigma change, came to have momentous consequences.

In 1944 Alan Turing was almost uniquely in possession of three key ideas:

* his own 1936 concept of the universal machine
* the potential speed and reliability of electronic technology
* the inefficiency in designing different machines for different logical processes.

Combined, these ideas provided the principle, the practical means, and the motivation for the modern computer, a single machine capable of handling any programmed task. He himself was as eager as anyone in the world to bring them together, and was spurred even more by a fourth idea: that the universal machine should be able to acquire and exhibit the faculties of the human mind. Even in 1944 he spoke to Donald Bayley of ‘building a brain’.

And by the end of the Second World War he had turned against the tentative idea that there were steps of ‘intuition’ in human thought corresponding to uncomputable operations. Instead, he held that the computer would offer unlimited scope for practical progress towards embodying intelligence in an artificial form.

For the second time, he experienced being pre-empted by a parallel American publication, in this case the EDVAC plan for an electronic computer, with Von Neumann’s name attached. Nonetheless, this publication when it appeared in June 1945 worked in practice to Turing’s advantage, American competition stimulating the National Physical Laboratory to plan a rival project, to which he was appointed a Senior Principal Scientific Officer. Turing despised his nominal superior J. Womersley, but at least initially this applied mathematician showed a rapid appreciation of the scope of Turing’s ideas, and with a eye for acronyms steered Turing’s design towards formal approval in early 1946 as the Automatic Computing Engine, or ACE.

First steps of Alan Turing

After graduating at King’s College (Cambridge) in 1935, Alan Turing received Smith’s Prize in 1936 for work on probability theory, and he might then have seemed on course for a successful career in pure mathematics. But his unpredictable and genius mind took him into completely different direction.

During next few years, Turing devotedly worked on analyzing what could be achieved by a person performing a methodical process, and seizing on the idea of something done ‘mechanically’, expressed the analysis in terms of a theoretical machine able to perform certain precisely defined elementary operations on symbols on paper tape. He presented convincing arguments that the scope of such a machine was sufficient to encompass everything that would count as a ‘definite method.’

In April 1936 he showed the result to public, but at the same time American logician Alonzo Church made the same conclusion which took away the originality of Turing’s idea. Still the concept of the Turing machine has become the foundation of the modern theory of computation and computability.

The concept of ‘the Turing machine’ is like that of ‘the formula’ or ‘the equation’; there is an infinity of possible Turing machines, each corresponding to a different ‘definite method’ or algorithm.  In other words – one machine for all possible tasks.

During the years spent at Princeton, Turing tried to make a cipher machine based on using electromagnetic relays to multiply binary numbers. Even then he saw a link from ‘useless’ logic to practical computation. Although not one of the political intellectuals of the 1930s, Turing followed current events and was influenced in studying ciphers by the prospect of war with Germany.

Who was Alan Turing?

Alan Turing was one of the most significant names in history of computer science. This Englihs mathematician, logician and cryptographist is the one who started the revolution in computer science. At the same time, Turing helped creating a basis for all purposed computers. That is why we will discuss in this blog Turing’s biography and fundamental question: Who really was Alan Turning?

Alan Mathison Turing was born on 23 June 1912. He shared with his brother a childhood determined by the demands of class and the exile in India of his parents. First interest in science, young Alan showed through primitive chemistry experiments and reading the book named “Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know”.

Following her mother’s whish, Alan Turning attended Sherborne School which was a public school, but he continued showing his enormous interest in science. Soon, the headmaster reported: “If he is to be solely a Scientific Specialist, he is wasting his time at a Public School.”

Despite this, Turing continued to show remarkable ability in the studies he loved, solving advanced problems in 1927 without having even studied elementary calculus. In 1928, Turing discovered Albert Einstein’s work; not only did he grasp it, but he extrapolated Einstein’s questioning of Newton’s laws of motion from a text in which this was never made explicit.

Turing’s hopes and ambitions at school were raised by the close friendship he developed with a slightly older fellow student, Christopher Morcom, who was Turing’s first love interest. Morcom died suddenly only a few weeks into their last term at Sherborne. At this point, disappointed and angry, Turing changes his religious beliefs and become an atheist. He adopted the conviction that all living things, including human brain, must be materialistic, but he still believed in the survival of the spirit after death.

To be continued …

How did it all start?

“It was the start of the computer age.” Mr Tootill

Forties of the 20^th century seem so far away today. It looks like everything was at the very beginning, and that it was almost impossible to imagine a strong expansion of informatics era. Or, at least, this is the way outsiders who don’t know much about informatics and computer science think. During the forties, scientists have devotedly and truly worked on all those things we have nowadays developed and improved. At that time, Manchester was a place where scientists intensively considered and tested possibilities of a commercial computer. That is how Manchester has become a “home” of the world’s first commercial computer – Ferranti Mark 1 (also known as Manchester Electronic Computer). Ferrenti Mark 1’s forebear was named Baby.

Mark 1 made the earliest known recording of computer music, playing a mixture of “God Save the King”, “Baa Baa Black Sheep” and “In the Mood”. This recording was made by the BBC at the end of 1951. Programming was done by Christopher Strachey, a teacher of mathematics at Harrow and a friend of Alan Turing (famous British mathematician).