ALAN TURING:
“FATHER OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE”
Alan Mathison Turing was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Alan Turing has a great mathematical mind and extraordinary capability to solve mathematical problems. Before World War II, Alan worked with the Cypher School and British Government’s code.
Less than a decade after breaking the Nazi encryption machine Enigma and helping the Allied Forces win World War II, mathematician Alan Turing changed history a second time with a simple question:
Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalization of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the “Father of theoretical CS & Artificial Intelligence.”
Alan Turing’s definition would have fallen under the category of a “system that acts like humans.”
The birth of the artificial intelligence conversation was introduced by Alan Turing’s seminal work, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” which was published in 1950. In this paper, Turing, often referred to as the “father of computer science”, where Alan Turing asks the following question, “Can a machine think?” afterward he introduced a test, which is now famously known as the “Turing Test”, where a human investigator helped to differentiate between a human and computer responses.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE:
Firstly, we have to know what Artificial Intelligence is:
Stated simply, “AI is trying to make computers think and act like humans”.
Artificial intelligence’s main goal has raised many questions and no particular explanation of artificial intelligence(AI) is logically accepted.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the basis for mimicking human intelligence in a dynamic computing environment, through the creation of algorithms.
FAMOUS FOR:
Turing’s most notable work today is as a computer scientist. In 1936, he developed the idea for the Universal Turing Machine, the basis for the first computer and he developed a test for artificial intelligence in 1950, which is still used today.
• Cryptanalysis of the Enigma
• Turing’s proof
• Turing machine
• Turing test
• Un-organized machine
• Turing pattern
• Turing reduction
• The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis
DURING SECOND WORLD WAR:
During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park.
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Alan Turing was the one who broke the code and transformed all Enigma text into a crystal-clear understandable appearance. Afterward, the British Government would know all assignments and operations of the German Military Armed Forces.
Through the intelligence of Alan Turing, British Government was able to save millions of lives and shorten the war by two or four years, and able to overcome the German armed Forces by cracking their messages.
German Government didn’t know that their code is cracked by the British Government till 1970.
After the war, Turing worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he designed the Automatic Computing Engine. The Automatic Computing Engine was one of the first designs for a stored-program computer.
BOMBE:
Alan Mathison Turing along with Gordon Welchman made a machine called Bombe to break the German Enigma Code, within weeks of arriving at Bletchley Park. The bombe, with an enhancement suggested by mathematician Gordon Welchman. They created a machine called bombe that can find Enigma settings in just 15 minutes and discover which setting Enigma used and became one of the primary tools, and the major automated one used to attack Enigma-enciphered messages. The machine Bombe cracked 84000 messages per month within hours or sometimes within minutes. At the end of the war, Turing was made an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his code-breaking work.
PETER HILTON WHO WAS A BRITISH MATHEMATICIAN, WHO ALSO WORKED ON CODE-BREAKING DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR SAID ABOUT “ALAN TURING”:
It is a rare experience to meet an authentic genius. However, the experience of sharing the intellectual life of a genius is entirely different, Peter Hilton realizes that Alan Turing has a high-level intelligence. While working at Bletchley, Turing, who was a talented long-distance runner, occasionally ran the 40 miles (64 km) to London.
Turing tried out for the 1948 British Olympic team but unfortunately, Alan was unable to do because of his injury. He was Walton Athletic Club’s best runner, a fact discovered when he passed the group while running alone. In 1946, Turing was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his wartime services, but his work remained secret for many years.
Now,
“Just Imagine how genius and talented he was!”
GOVERNMENT APOLOGY AND PARDON:
In August 2009, British programmer John Graham started a petition urging the British government to apologize for Turing’s prosecution.
The petition received more than 30,000 signatures. The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, acknowledged the petition, releasing a statement on 10 September 2009 apologizing and describing the treatment of Turing as appalling.
Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated.
While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him.
So, on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say:
“we’re sorry, you deserved so much better”.
AWARDS, HONORS, AND TRIBUTES:
Turing has been honored in various ways in Manchester, the city where he worked toward the end of his life. In 1994, a stretch of the road (the Manchester city intermediate ring road) was named “Alan Turing Way”.
A bridge carrying this road was widened and carries the name Alan Turing Bridge. A “ statue of Turing” was unveiled in Manchester on 23 June 2001 in Sackville Park, between the University of Manchester building on Whitworth Street and Canal Street.
The memorial statue depicts the “Father of computer science” sitting on a bench at a central position in the park.
The cast bronze bench carries in relief the text ‘Alan Mathison Turing 1912–1954’, and the motto ‘Founder of Computer Science’ as it could appear if encoded by an Enigma machine.
A plaque at the statue’s feet reads “Father of computer science, mathematician, logician, wartime codebreaker, a victim of prejudice”.
There is also a Bertrand Russell quotation: “Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.” The sculptor buried his own old Amstrad computer under the plinth as a tribute to “The godfather of all modern computers”
In 1999, Time magazine named Turing as one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th century and stated, “The fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine.”
