alan turing - webeden€¦ · alan turing has been described as “the man who saved the world”...

14
ALAN TURING has been described as “the man who saved the world”

Upload: others

Post on 25-Apr-2020

12 views

Category:

Documents


0 download

TRANSCRIPT

ALAN TURING

has been described as “the man who

saved

the world”

Alan Turing was a mathematical genius. He is often described as “the father of the computer”. The computer industry’s annual awards, their equivalent of the Nobel prizes, are called the Alan Turing Awards.

The picture shows a country house at Bletchley Park (near Milton Keynes) as it is today.

This picture shows Bletchley Park in 1938, when it was taken over by the government as a centre for intelligence and code breaking.

Alan Turing led the team of code breakers who were based at Bletchley Park

In the early years of World War II, German submarines had been sinking British and Allied ships on an enormous scale. Hundreds of ships were sunk, thousands of lives were lost and valuable cargoes ended up at the bottom of the sea.

The German submarines received, in an encrypted form, instructions about where they were to head. The encryption was done using the Enigma machine.

Turing cracked the Enigma code and that gave the British details of the movements of the German submarines. The information obtained meant that now it was British ships which were torpedoing and sinking the German submarines.

Winston Churchill said Alan Turing’s work changed the course of the war and without it the war would have gone on for at least another two years … and might have been lost altogether.

The German codes were cracked using machines called “bombes” - seen in action above. All work at Bletchley Park was governed by the Official Secrets Act, so details of what happened there were not revealed until the 1970s.

One of the consequences of this secrecy was that the Bletchley people could not talk about the fact that they had invented the world’s first working computer. It was called “Colossus” and a reconstruction can now be seen at Bletchley Park, which is now a museum.

After the war, Turing’s creativity continued. He devised the “Turing Test” (a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour) and was the first person to write equations which described “Chaos Theory”, which is now used to predict the weather and to explain why tigers are striped and leopards are spotted.

After the war he was sidelined as an embarrassment, because he was a gay man. In 1952 he experienced the fate of many gay men of the period - he was arrested for gross indecency. He was given the choice: Go to jail or take “the treatment”. He chose “the treatment”. The conviction meant that he lost his security clearance.

The “treatment” was a cocktail of drugs which was described as “chemical castration”. He found the side-effects so depressing that he injected an apple with cyanide, took a bite and killed himself.

What the world could have gained had he lived on, we will never know.

His statute dominates one of the rooms at the Bletchley Park museum. Opposite the statue is a written apology from Gordon Brown (the then Prime Minister) about how the country treated Alan Turing.

Since then, he has received an official posthumous pardon.