Alan Turing
An English mathematician, computer scientist, and logician. Widely regarded as the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence
LEGACY
Mathematician
Alan Turing was a brilliant mathematician. Born in London in 1912, he studied at both Cambridge and Princeton universities. He was already working part-time for the British Government’s Code and Cypher School before the Second World War broke out. In 1939, Turing took up a full-time role at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire – where top secret work was carried out to decipher the military codes used by Germany and its allies.
The Bombe
The main focus of Turing’s work at Bletchley was in cracking the ‘Enigma’ code. The Enigma was a type of enciphering machine used by the German armed forces to send messages securely. Although Polish mathematicians had worked out how to read Enigma messages and had shared this information with the British, the Germans increased its security at the outbreak of war by changing the cipher system daily. This made the task of understanding the code even more difficult. Turing played a key role in this, inventing – along with fellow code-breaker Gordon Welchman – a machine known as the Bombe. This device helped to significantly reduce the work of the code-breakers. From mid-1940, German Air Force signals were being read at Bletchley and the intelligence gained from them was helping the war effort.
Turingery
In July 1942, Turing developed a complex code-breaking technique he named ‘Turingery’. This method fed into work by others at Bletchley in understanding the ‘Lorenz’ cipher machine. Turing travelled to the United States in December 1942, to advise US military intelligence in the use of Bombe machines and to share his knowledge of Enigma. Whilst there, he also saw the latest American progress on a top secret speech enciphering system. Turing returned to Bletchley in March 1943, where he continued his work in cryptanalysis. Later in the war, he developed a speech scrambling device which he named ‘Delilah’. In 1945, Turing was awarded an OBE for his wartime work.
Computer Science
After the war, Turing continued to develop his ideas about computer science. His work led to the construction of the first true computers, but his most famous work came in 1950 when he published a paper asking “can machines think?”. He detailed a procedure, later known as the Turing test, to determine whether a machine could imitate human conversation. It became a foundational part of the field of artificial intelligence, though many modern researchers question its usefulness.
