Day 29: mat385

Thoughts on Turing's life and career, from www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Turing.html:

• Turing the runner: "Turing came fifth in the AAA marathon which was used as a qualifying event for the 1949 Olympic games. His time was 2 hours 46.03 minutes which by modern marathon times does not look so great but was good at that time. To put it in perspective, the winning Olympic time was only 10 minutes better at the 1948 Olympics."

• "In 1936 he published On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem. It is in this paper that Turing introduced an abstract machine, now called a Turing machine, which moved from one state to another using a precise finite set of rules (given by a finite table) and depending on a single symbol it read from a tape.

  "The Turing machine could write a symbol on the tape, or delete a symbol from the tape."

• "When war was declared in 1939 Turing immediately moved to work full-time at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. Although the work carried out at Bletchley Park was covered by the Official Secrets Act, much has recently become public knowledge. Turing's brilliant ideas in solving codes, and developing computers to assist break them, may have saved more lives of military personnel in the course of the war than any other."

• "In 1950 Turing published Computing machinery and intelligence in Mind. It is another remarkable work from his brilliantly inventive mind which seemed to foresee the questions which would arise as computers developed. He studied problems which today lie at the heart of artificial intelligence. It was in this 1950 paper that he proposed the Turing Test which is still today the test people apply in attempting to answer whether a computer can be intelligent."

• "Turing was arrested for violation of British homosexuality statutes in 1952 when he reported to the police details of a homosexual affair. He had gone to the police because he had been threatened with blackmail. He was tried as a homosexual on 31 March 1952, offering no defence other than that he saw no wrong in his actions. Found guilty he was given the alternatives of prison or oestrogen injections for a year. He accepted the latter and returned to a wide range of academic pursuits."

• "After his conviction, his security clearance was withdrawn. Worse than that, security officers were now extremely worried that someone with complete knowledge of the work going on at GCHQ was now labelled a security risk. He had many foreign colleagues, as any academic would, but the police began to investigate his foreign visitors. A holiday which Turing took in Greece in 1953 caused consternation among the security officers."

• "Turing died of potassium cyanide poisoning while conducting electrolysis experiments. The cyanide was found on a half eaten apple beside him. An inquest concluded that it was self-administered but his mother always maintained that it was an accident."

• "Barry Goldwater: "You don't have to be straight to be in the military; you just have to be able to shoot straight". (source)

• `On the subject of gays in the military, for example, the 2000 [Republican] platform repeats the 1996 statement that "homosexuality is incompatible with military service."

  `"Gov. Bush believes and supports the 'don't ask, don't tell' policy, which means gay people can be in the military, they just can't be open about their sexuality," said Schmid. "It's clear that Governor Bush is disappointed with the way some of the platform votes went."' (Source: http://www.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/08/01/plank.change/)

• Alan Turing --- a short biography. Part 3 --- The Turing Machine
• Part 4 --- The Second World War