The father of computer science and artificial intelligence. Who could ever have sired such a thing?
Alan Mathison Turing. That’s who.
He was born on June 23, 1912, in London. On this date.
Turing was one smart fellow. He developed the Turing machine, in 1936. But what is it exactly? Well, the dictionary puts it this way: “A mathematical model of a hypothetical computing machine which can use a predefined set of rules to determine a result from a set of input variables.”
In other words? A problem-solving machine. Ka-Ching.
Alan Turing was remarkable. He started showing his smarts at a very young age by impressing his teachers in grade school. He used to solve complex equations even though he’d never been taught them.
It continued. This high level of intelligence, throughout his entire life. Besides his work in computer science, he also did an incredible amount in the field of artificial intelligence. Not to mention his work in cryptology.
Don’t get mad at Alan Turing. Though many of us are mad at him without knowing it. Every time we get asked, “Are you a robot?” it is sort of his fault. You see, he was the first person to set those standards of intelligence to differentiate humans from machines. And now we see his work all the time in places where CAPTCHA is used to determine if we are human. Or not.
Here is my question about all that. A sidebar, really. What keeps those robots from lying whenever they are asked, like us, “Are you a robot?” — Have robots taken some sort of “Robot Oath” where they must immediately fess up to being robots? Or can they be like humans and lie whenever they want? I mean, a robot could just answer, “Nope. No robot here. Let me into your website now.”
Back to Turing. Maybe his most amazing feat was to break the Enigma Code in WWII. His work, in breaking that code, saved thousands of lives. He may have been responsible for ending the war many years early.
But here is the thing about Turing. He was gay. Openly gay. And there he was, born in 1912 and living his life in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. He underwent terrible persecution for being gay, something that was of no choice to him.
Being gay at the time was simply not allowed, and homosexual acts were illegal in the UK. After admitting to a sexual relationship with Arnold Murray, he was charged with gross indecency by the British government.
So they gave Turing a choice. He could either be imprisoned or undergo chemical castration. Not much of a choice, but one thing you never want to be is a gay man in prison. So he chose castration. Not only for that reason but also in order for him to continue his work.
Alan Turing died on June 8, 1954. He was 41 years old at the time of his death. Suicide by cyanide poisoning. Yes, he ate an apple laced with cyanide. Reportedly. His mother insisted that the poisoning was accidental. Suicide was indicated as likely, given the persecution Turing suffered from being openly gay.
Imagine the things he could have gone on to do. The lives he might have touched. And our sad, lame, pitiful society continues to persecute people who are different from themselves, ruling the world with brains no bigger than walnuts if you ask me.
It would be nice if the Turing machine could solve that big problem.
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“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
― Søren Kierkegaard
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“It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.”
― Albert Camus, Neither Victims Nor Executioners
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“It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
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The big machine that figures it out. Almost.
