The Man Who Believed Machines Could Think

In 1952, the mathematician Alan Turing called the police to report that his house in Manchester had been burgled. The thieves did not take much, so it first seemed that the official statement of the burglary would be no more than a formality. It was not very likely that the burglars would be discovered and the stolen items and money retrieved. It soon turned out that the mathematician would have been much better off if he had not contacted the police. After a brief questioning on the possible background of the burglary, Turing was suddenly transformed from the victim into the criminal.


A moral crime

Turing confessed to the officers that he had been seeing a nineteen-year-old youth called Arnold Murray who he had met shortly before the incident. Arnold had spent a couple of nights at his place and also borrowed some money, so it was very possible that he had something to do with the burglary. Now, the police were no longer interested in the details of the theft, but in another offence which Turing was careless enough to confess.

At the time, homosexuality was still considered to be a crime in England and the police quickly grasped the true nature of the relationship between the two men. Turing was summoned to appear in court on the same charges (“gross indecency”) for which Oscar Wilde had been sentenced to two years in prison half a century earlier. During the trial Turing never denied his “crime”, and was – according to the law from 1885 which was originally created to protect women – sentenced to choose between imprisonment or compulsory treatment of homosexuality. He decided for treatment which was more like torture and did nothing to change his sexual orientation.

In order to avoid prison he had to, in accordance with the sentence of the court, undergo a one year therapy with the female sex hormone estrogen which was supposed to eradicate his lust for men. For a year, he received regular shots of estrogen leading him to gain weight and visibly develop breasts. In reality, the hormone therapy was a sort of chemical castration as it did not “heal” his homosexuality, the worst part of it being that it also affected his ability to think and concentrate. Because of this completely absurd law, the British legal apparatus systematically destroyed one of the greatest minds of England. At the time Alan Turing was just over 40 years old.


100 km bicycle ride to school

In the beginning of the twentieth century Turing’s father served as a British colonial officer in India. Because his mother believed the Indian environment to be inappropriate for the education of her two sons, Alan and his older brother John spent their youth in different English institutions for children and, later, in boarding schools. In 1926 when Alan was 14 years old, he was accepted to the renowned Sherborne School, but almost came in late for his first day of class. England was just then in the middle of a general strike during which public transportation was cancelled, so young Alan had to set off on a 100 km long journey from his home to the school on a bicycle. His unusual cycling exploit was even mentioned in the newspapers.

He continued to lead an athletic life, especially as a long distance runner. He often used to run to science conferences, sometimes even beating his colleagues who preferred other means of transportation. He actually became good enough to make the British Olympic team in 1948 if not for an unfortunate injury.
Alan discovered his homosexuality early, during his teen years, when he was strongly attached to one of his classmates who suddenly died after complications in his tuberculosis treatment. The loss of a good friend in his youth also dealt a blow to his faith. He became an atheist and firmly convinced that everything had to have a factual explanation, even the processes which lead to thoughts in the brain.

After he failed twice to obtain the scholarship for the prestigious Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, he decided to enroll into King’s College where, among others, John Maynard Keynes and E. M. Forster lectured. After writing an excellent doctoral thesis, he was invited to remain at the university as a teacher and a researcher. If not for the Second World War, he probably would have continued his academic career for a long time, but his country needed him for another, highly important national security project.


How to decipher the Enigma?

After he had obtained his doctorate he left for the United States and spent a couple of years at Princeton University, but came back when the Second World War broke out and started working in a secret decryption center somewhere between Cambridge and Oxford, called Bletchley Park. This was where the British gathered up mathematicians, chess masters, Egyptologists and all others that were in any way capable of helping decipher intercepted German military messages.

It was particularly difficult to decipher the enemy’s coded messages because the German Army used a special mechanical device called the Enigma which looked like a kind of typewriter. With the aid of this device they could encode their messages so efficiently that they were certain that, without the decryption key, which they changed every day, nobody would be able to read them.

Soon after his arrival to Bletchley Park, Turing and his colleagues developed an electro-mechanic machine which enabled them to break the German code each day and read the messages of the hostile army. It was especially important that they also succeeded in breaking the additionally reinforced code system which had been used by German submarines in the North Atlantic. Turing’s ideas, in which he had combined all of his previous research in the foundations of logic and mathematics with the notion of a machine that could do great amounts of work quickly and efficiently, were of key importance in the successful deciphering of the Enigma.

Like many great scholars, Turing was a peculiar character himself. He rode a bicycle to his post in Bletchley Park wearing a gas mask which he believed would protect him from pollen. In the tearoom he chained his cup to the radiator, so that nobody would take it.

Until the British removed the label classified from the documents containing information about their great wartime project of decoding German military messages, Alan Turing was best known to the public for his achievements in the fields of mathematical logic and theoretical basics of artificial intelligence. It was only after this revelation that it became clear how important his influence on the events that took place during the war was.


The poisoned apple

After the war, he returned to Cambridge hoping to find some peace in his academic work. He joined a group that was trying to build a working prototype of a computer, but soon discovered that after the war many of the bureaucratic restrictions were restored, making work more difficult. During the war, the solution to deciphering German messages was needed quickly, so scholars were given free rein in choosing their methods of work. All that mattered were results. After the war, bureaucracy was reinforced and Turing did not really feel at home in Cambridge, so he accepted a position at the University of Manchester whose researchers were also attempting to construct a computer.

During his stay in Manchester he published some more influential articles, among which the well known article on artificial intelligence in which he presented his famous test designed to determine if a computer could really think. According to the Turing test, as it was later called, a machine can be said to be capable of thought when, on the basis of its answers, no one can tell whether it is a human or a machine that is answering the questions.

On the 8th of June 1954 his cleaning lady found him dead in his bed. On his night table was a bitten apple poisoned with cyanide. Although there was no death note to be found it is almost certain that he had committed suicide. His mother firmly believed that her son’s death was the result of his carelessness after a chemistry experiment, but, as one of his biographers is convinced, Turing had supposedly deliberately committed suicide in such a way that his mother was able to create her own interpretation of the tragic event.

As Turing is regarded as the father of modern computers, many years after his death the rumor started spreading that the bitten apple, which is today the trademark of the Apple company, was in fact a tribute to the tragic life story of “the father” of computers, but it has never been officially confirmed.