Alan Turing - Quick facts

 

 

 

Alan Turing was a mathematical genius who worked at Bletchley Park during WWII, helping to create the Bombe that cracked messages enciphered with the German Enigma machines.

Unfortunately he lived in a time of intolerance and misunderstanding. He was prosecuted under the gross indecency act after admitting to a sexual relationship with a man. He was convicted and given experimental chemical castration as a "treatment" and was told he could not continue to work for the UK Government. Two years later he killed himself.

Towards the end of his life Turing became interested in chemistry. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis, and he predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, which were first observed in the 1960s.

On 10 September 2009, following an Internet campaign, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for the way in which Turing was treated after the war.

Alan Turing - Quotes

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

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.

Machines take me by surprise with great frequency

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

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.

Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.

We are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge.

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