Breaking through the Enigma
Traversing through the Unbreakable Code
Alan Turing
Childhood
Alan Turing was born June 23, 1912 in a nursing home in Paddington, London. Alan was the second youngest kid of Julius Mathison and Ethel Sara Turing. He was born into an upper-middle-class family that was far from rich. Ethel Turing was in the Indian Civil Service, serving in the Madras Presidency. Up until his father’s retirement in 1926, Alan and his older brother John fostered in multiple homes all around England. Science, to Alan, was an extra-curricular passion. His mother viewed science as a trial. She was mostly terrified that he wouldn’t be accepted into the local public school, the English Public School. Soon, Alan got invited to attend the Sherborn School. The headmaster had later said, “If he is to be solely a Scientific Specialist, he is wasting his time at a Public School.” Alan found an intellectual companionship, Christopher Morcom, but sadly, Morcom passed away in February of 1930.
(www.turing.org.uk)
“Can machines think?"... The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the 'imitation game." It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B... We now ask the question, "What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?" Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, "Can machines think?”
- Alan Turing
(www.goodreads.com)
Alan Turing as a school boy
College Years
Alan Turing was an undergraduate at Cornbridge in 1931. In 1932 he began to transition from emotional to rigorous intellectual enquiry. During this time, homeosexuality became a part of his identity. Alan’s interest was particularly in answering the question of a compelling definition of ‘method’. He came up with his answer, and proposed it to the Cambridge tropologist M.H.A. Newman. Turing’s idea was stolen, which he later wrote about in "On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem". Alan spent two years at Princeton University as a graduate student, in September 1936. At Princeton, Turning became working on a cipher machine based on using electromagnetic relays.
(www.biography.com)
Final Years
Alan Turing was elected fellow of the Royal Society of London, in March of 1951. Homosexuality, in Britain at the time, was a crime. Turing was convicted of “gross indecency” in March of 1952. Alan was sentenced to 12 months of hormone “therapy”. And now because of his criminal record, he will never again be able to work for the British government’s Post War Code-Breaking Centre. He published “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis” in 1952, and began developing his studies around living organisms. In the middle of his work, Turning was found dead in his bed. He was poisoned by cyanide, which people believe, even though it was two years prior, came from his hormone “treatment”. In the early 21st century Turning’s punishment for being gay became infamouse. In 2013, Queen Elizabth the 2nd granted Turing a royal pardon. (www.britannica.com)
Oldest photo of Alan Turing