XNUMXth anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing - the inventor of the modern computer and victim of the persecution of homosexuals in Britain and the entire Western world in the XNUMXs

The man who invented the theoretical Turing machine, which is still used in computers today, and the Turing test for measuring artificial intelligence of computers had to commit suicide after being harassed by the police when he broke the law against homosexuality in Britain in the XNUMXs

After the massacre at the youth bar, we published on the Hidan website Chapter from the book 'The Man Who Knew Too Much' - The biography of Alan Turing.

Alan Turing was born in London on June 23, 1912 and died in Wilmslow, Cheshire, England on June 7, 1954, at the age of 42.

Alan Turing was born in Paddington, London. His father, Julius Mattison Turing was a Briton who worked in the Indian civil service and traveled abroad frequently. Alan's mother, Ethel Sarah Stoney, was the daughter of the chief engineer of the Madras Railway. Alan's parents met and married in India. When Alan was a year old, his mother joined her husband in India, leaving Alan in England with friends and family. Alan was sent to school but it didn't seem to be of any use and so he was kicked out after a few months.

He was then sent to a preparatory school in Hazelhurst where he appeared to be an average to good student in most areas but tended towards his own ideas. He became interested in chess at school and even joined a debating club. He completed the standard entrance exams in 1926 (our equivalent of matriculation) and was sent to Sherburne School.

In 1926 there was a great strike in Great Britain, during which he had to ride a bicycle about a hundred kilometers to school. This is not a difficult task for Turing who later became an athlete of almost Olympic standards. He had difficulty adjusting to the demands of public school, but his mother was adamant that he must receive a public education. Many of the creative thinkers believed that the public school did not help them, and this was the case with Turing as well. His genius drove him in his own directions that were different from those required by the teachers.

He was criticized for his handwriting, struggled with English and even math. He was too interested in his own ideas for solving problems raised by the teachers. Despite providing unconventional answers, Turing won almost every possible prize in mathematics while at Sherburne. In chemistry, a subject in which he was interested from a young age, he carried out experiments according to his own ideas, which was not liked by his teachers, as his educator wrote.

"To stay in a public school, the student must be educated. If he wants to be a full-time scientist, he's wasting his time at a public school."

This sentence indicates more about the education system that Turing was educated in than about Turing himself. Nevertheless, Turing studied mathematics while at school, even though his teachers were not aware of the things he had learned himself. He read Einstein's articles on the theory of relativity and also read about quantum mechanics in Ediganton's book "The Nature of the Physical World"
An event that influenced Turing during his short life occurred in 1928. He formed a close friendship with Christopher Morcom, a student a year above him at school, and the two worked together on scientific ideas. This may have been the first time Turing could share his ideas with someone else. However, Morcom died in February 1930 and the experience was difficult for Turing. He fell ill and felt something that science could not explain. He later wrote "it is not difficult to explain such things, but I am amazed".

Despite the difficult years, Tirong was admitted to King's College, Cambridge in 1931 to study mathematics. He did not reach this achievement without difficulties. Turing took the scholarship tests in 1929 and won the exhibition, but not the scholarship. He was not satisfied with the performance, and applied again a year later. This time he won the coveted scholarship. In many ways Cambridge was a much easier place for unconventional people like Turing than school. He could explore his ideas and read Russell's Handbook of Mathematical Philosophy in 1933. Around the same time he read von Neumann's 1932 paper on quantum mechanics, a subject he returned to several times in his life.

In 1933 he became interested in mathematical logic. He read an article in the scientific club named after Morel in December (of or in) that year, a moment that was recorded: "A.M. Turing read an article about 'Mathematics and Logic'. He suggests that the purely logical point of view of mathematics is insufficient and that mathematics offers a variety of interpretations where logic offers only one interpretation with difficulty."

The year 1933 was also the year of Hitler's rise to power in Germany and of the anti-war movement in Britain. Turing joined the anti-war movement but did not drift towards Marxism or pacifism as happened to many.

Turing graduated in 1934 and in the spring of 1935 he joined Max Newman's advanced course on the foundations of mathematics. In the course, the studies about Godel's incompleteness and Hilbert's basic theorem were studied. In one of Hilbert's books an expression and an algorithm appeared in which there is a decision whether the mathematical expression is true or false. For many expressions it would be easy to put together such an algorithm. The great difficulty arises when no such algorithm exists. When an algorithm was given to solve the problem, it was clear that it was an algorithm, but there was no definition of an algorithm tough enough to prove that there is no such algorithm. Turing began working on these ideas.
Turing was elected a fellow of King's College, Cambridge in 1935 for his doctoral thesis on Gaussian error functions, in which he also proved fundamental results of probability theory, notably the central limit theorem. Although this is a theory that was discovered not long before, Turing was not aware of this and discovered it independently.

Turing's achievements at Cambridge were mainly in the field of probability theory, but he also worked on specific questions since joining Newman's course. In 1936 he published a paper on computable numbers. In this article, Turing presented an abstract machine, which is now called a "Turing machine" that goes from one state to another using a finite series of rules (formulated as a table of finite size) and dependent on a single symbol that it reads from a movie."
"The machine can read a symbol from a film or erase a symbol from the film" writes Turing.
Some of the symbols are decimal numbers that represent the actual numbers that were calculated, and others are machine instructions. Only these instructions can be deleted.

He defined a computable number as a real number expressed in decimal numbers, and which can be produced by a Turing machine when starting from a blank tape. He showed that Pi is computable but not all numbers are real numbers. He described a number that cannot be calculated and commented that there seems to be a paradox because it appears to be describable in finite terms, but is a number that cannot be described in finite terms. He understood the source of the paradox. It is difficult to decide, using another Turing machine, whether a Turing machine containing instruction tables can output an infinite series of numbers.

Although it was an important article and later it turned out that it contributed a lot to mathematics and computer science, it was not easy to publish it. The reason was that he clashed with an article by Alonzo Church in which he described an unsolvable mathematical problem in elementary number theory in the American Journal of Mathematics in 1936, in which he also proved that there are no decision procedures for arithmetic. Turing's approach was different from Church's but Newman had to convince the members of the London Mathematical Society to publish the paper. Tirong received an article containing references to Church's results. And the article completed in April 1936 was finally accepted in August of that year and published in 1937.

A good result of the confrontation with Church was Turing's acceptance as a graduate student at Princeton University in 1936. At Princeton he researched under the direction of Church and he returned to Britain in 1938. During one of the vacations, in the summer of 1937, he met Wittenstein. The important paper he published at Princeton was on systems of logic based on serial numbers published in 1939.

Perhaps his most impressive work on the Turing machine was when he described a modern computer before the technology had reached the point where it could be implemented. He proved in 1936 for the first time that it was possible to build a universal Turing machine that could do the work of dedicated machines, that is, take every bit of computation if the tape containing appropriate instructions was inserted. That is, the first clue to the separation between the software and the hardware.

Although Turing's computer was a person who performed the calculations, we must see in the description of a universal Turing machine what we see today as a computer and the film as software.
At Princeton Turing toyed with the idea of ​​building a computer, but when he returned to Cambridge in 1938 he tried to build an analog mathematical machine to investigate the Riemann hypothesis, which many still believe today to be an unsolvable problem in mathematics. However, he was busy after he received a request from the government cryptography school that asked him to help decipher the German Enigma cipher.

When war was declared in 1939, Turing moved to work full-time at the Government Cipher School in Baltchy Park. Although the work there was shrouded in secrecy, he managed to publish articles. Turing's brilliant ideas about solving the code, and the development of computers to help crack the messages transmitted through this code saved many lives, perhaps more than any other defense system.

Together with another mathematician, W. J. Volchmann, Thiruing developed Bombe, a machine based on the work of Polish mathematicians who decoded a message sent in Enigma cipher to the German Air Force. The German Navy's Enigma machines were much more difficult to decipher but this was the kind of challenge Turing enjoyed. By mid-1941, Turing's statistical approach that captured information, led to the decoding of German naval signals at Bletschel.

From November 1942 to March 1943, Turing stayed in the USA and solved coding problems, and also gave a lecture about equine systems. The changes in the way the Germans viewed the messages meant that Bletchley lost the ability to decode them. Turing was not directly involved in breaking the more complex ciphers but his ideas proved important to this work. Turing was awarded the OBE in 1945 for his vital contribution to the war effort.

At the end of the war, Turing was invited to the National Physical Laboratory in London to design a computer. His proposal to build an automatic computing engine (ACE) was accepted in March 1946. It was a modern computer, when the size of the memory it required was hopeless for implementation according to many of those who read the proposal.

Turing returned to Cambridge in the academic year 1947-48 where he was interested in many subjects that were far from computing and mathematics, in particular he studied neurology and physiology. He did not forget about computers and wrote code for computer programming. He also took up sports, was a member of the Walton Athletic Club, broke records in the 3 and 10 mile runs and placed fifth in the 1947 AAA Marathon.

In 1948 Newman was appointed professor of mathematics at the University of Manchester and offered Turing a chair there. Turing resigned from the National Laboratory to move to Manchester.

In 1950 Turing published an article on artificial intelligence. In another work he predicted the questions that would arise when computers were developed. He studied problems that today are at the heart of the field of artificial intelligence. In this sub-article he proposed the Turing Test where people try to answer the question of whether a computer can be intelligent. He was involved in studies about the difference and similarities between machines and the human brain.

Turing was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1951, mainly for his work on Turing machines from 1936. In 1951 he worked on the application of mathematical theory to biological forms. In 1952 he published for the first time his theoretical research on morphogenesis - the development of patterns and forms in living things.

Turing was arrested for violating the same-sex law in 1952 when he reported to the police a homosexual affair he had had. He went to the police after being blackmailed. He was tried as a homosexual on March 31, 1952 and his defense claim was that he did not see anything wrong with it. He was convicted and asked to choose between prison and an estrogen injection. He agreed to get an injection and returned to his academic work.

He returned to work on morphogenesis and even delved into ideas related to quantum theory, the representation of an elementary particle by spinors, and the theory of relativity. Although he was open about his sexual orientation, he was saddened by the fact that he was not allowed to talk about it due to the provisions of the law.

Turing continued to work for the government institute without the knowledge of his colleagues in Manchester who also did not know what he had done in the war. After his conviction, his security clearance was revoked. Worse, the security officers feared that someone with as perfect a knowledge as his of the government research center might pose a security risk. He had as many foreign colleagues as any academic, but the police began to question his guests from abroad. A vacation he took in Greece in 1953 caused tension among the security personnel.

Turing died by suicide by potassium cyanide poisoning while experimenting with electrolysis. The cyanide is found in a half-eaten apple next to it. The official version was that he committed suicide, but his mother later claimed that it was an accident.

Papers written by Turing that were secret until now have been revealed

Yossi the Tony, People and Computers, May 13, 2012

Two papers by Alan Turing, the British mathematician who cracked the Nazi Enigma cipher, were revealed at the weekend by the British government's communications headquarters.

The articles discuss the theory of cracking the code. Turing appears to have written the papers while working on cracking the code at Bletchley Park, where there was a secret British intelligence base. A mathematician at the communications headquarters of the British government said that the fact that the documents were classified for such a long time "testifies to their enormous importance at the time".

The disclosure of the articles was made on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Turing's birth. They are now available to view at the National Archives of Great Britain in West London. Britain's communications headquarters was able to roughly date the writing of the documents, as one of the two contains a reference to Adolf Hitler's age.

One of the documents discusses applications of probabilities during encryption, and the other - statistics of recurrences (repetitions) with a mathematical approach to cracking the code.

"Turing had brilliant ideas, but they were ahead of their time. The importance of ideas is priceless for the future of the world," said the British media headquarters.

Determining the settings in the Enigma encryption machines used by the Germans was essential for breaking the code and ultimately led to the creation of a strategic advantage for the British, and then for all the Allies, in their war against the Germans, especially against the Nazi submarines.

According to a mathematician from the British Communications Headquarters, who identified himself only as Richard, the documents contain details with mathematical analysis, to try and determine what the reasonable settings are for determining the encryption, so that they can break them as quickly as possible.

Turing developed an electro-mechanical decoding machine called "Bomb", which mechanized and accelerated the process of decoding the encrypted Enigma messages. He laid the foundations for computer science and achieved extraordinary achievements on the theoretical and practical side of the field. On the theoretical side, Turing introduced the Turing machine to the world - an abstract model of how a computer works, and the Turing test - which tests whether a machine has an artificial intelligence that would not make it possible to distinguish between it and a human. On the practical side, as mentioned, Turing was the central figure in the British effort during World War II to crack the code of the Enigma encryption machine of the German army - an effort that made a decisive contribution to the victory of the Allies in the war.

Turing committed suicide in 1954, following the side effects of hormone therapy, a kind of chemical castration, which was imposed on him after he was convicted of homosexuality, which was a crime in Britain in those years.