Life and achievements
Early life
Alan Mathison Turing was born on June 23, 1912, in Maida Vale, London. His father, Julius Mathison Turing, worked in the Indian Civil Service while his mother, Ethel Sara Turing, was the daughter of the chief engineer of the Madras Railways. As a child, Turing was fond of mathematics and science and was known to be very intelligent compared to his other children.
Frequent moves characterized Turing's early school years because his father changed posting to India. He was at St. Michael's, a preparatory school, where he was first identified as a genius. He started his formal education at the Sherborne School in Dorset, a famous boarding school, in 1926. Turing struggled with other subjects that could have been more interesting; however, he developed an interest in science, especially chemistry and mathematics.
Turing joined King's College, Cambridge 1931 to read for the Mathematics tripos. He was to spend some of the happiest years at Cambridge; he flourished in the academic ambiance and obtained first-class honours in 1934. He also contributed to developing probability theory, which earned him a fellowship at King's College, enhancing his educational status.
Legacy
It is hard to overestimate Alan Turing's impact on the development of science and technology; his contributions affected many fields. Thus, his concept of the Turing Machine gave a theoretical foundation for the growth of computer science and its capabilities by proposing a machine that can compute any task given a proper algorithm and tools. This theoretical construct is still relevant in computer science even to this day.
Turing's contributions during the Second World War at Bletchley Park significantly influenced the war's outcome. Thus, by creating methods to decrypt the Enigma code, Turing and other Bletchley Park members helped the Allies intercept important German messages, bring the war to a faster end, and save millions of lives. He contributed to the development of cryptography and developed the foundation of the encryption techniques used today and cybersecurity.
After his death, Turing was recognized and awarded for his work. The first Turing Award, presented in 1966 by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), is commonly known as the Nobel Prize for Computing. His life has been recounted in many films, books, and plays; therefore, it has become part of popular culture and people's consciousness.
In the last few years, attempts to pay tribute to Turing and right the wrongs he suffered because of his homosexuality have been made. The UK government's official apology in 2013 and the "Alan Turing law" in 2017 that pardoned men convicted of historical homosexual charges are evidence of his influence on science and social change.
Turing's work continues after his technical contributions; his approach to problem-solving, which fuses math, biology, and philosophy, is still relevant today. He is one of the pioneers of Artificial Intelligence, and his contribution to this field, especially the Turing test, is still used today as a basis for discussions in the field.
Milestone moments
Jun 1, 1936
Publication of the paper On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem
Turing published his paper in June 1936, which contained the idea of a universal machine called the Turing Machine.
This paper focused on the Entscheidungsproblem (decision problem) and explained how it is possible to show that a specific machine cannot solve specific mathematical questions.
Turing's work is the theoretical basis of computer science today; he made some principles that are still in use today.
Sep 5, 1939
Joining Bletchley Park
During World War II, Turing got involved with the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park.
He devised methods of cracking the German Enigma machine there, which immensely helped the Allies during the war.
He was instrumental in decoding enemy messages, a critical factor in the Allied forces' triumph.
Mar 1, 1946
Design of the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE)
After the war, Turing got a job at the National Physical Laboratory, where he developed the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE).
The ACE was one of the earliest designs for a stored-program computer, in line with Turing's concept of a machine that could solve any numerical problem.
Although the full-scale ACE was not constructed during his tenure, his design paved the way for the construction of other computers.
Oct 1, 1950
The appearance of the paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence."
In 1950, in his paper on computing machinery and intelligence, Turing introduced what is now the famous Turing test.
The Turing Test is a test of a machine's capability to mimic human behaviour so that it cannot be distinguished from a human being; this paves the way for further research on artificial intelligence.
Turing's concepts presented in this paper are still relevant to the discussions and advancements of artificial intelligence today.