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Alan Turing was one of the world’s greatest geniuses. He basically invented the modern computer and was instrumental in helping end WWII, even though he never set foot on a battlefield. The Germans had invented the ultimate message coding device, the Enigma machine, and if the Allies wanted to take down Hitler, they were going to need to figure it out. Fortunately, there was Alan Turing’s code breaking park, Bletchley, where he and others achieved movie-worthy feats. In fact, it did make a great film, The Imitation Game, released in 2014 and starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the man himself.
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In World War II, the Germans had the ultimate message coding device, the Enigma machine
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And if the Allies were going to win, they were going to need to figure it out. Fortunately, the Allies had an ultimate weapon of their own, Alan Turing
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Turing basically invented the modern computer, and though he never set foot on a battlefield
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he was instrumental in helping end World War II. You'd think Turing would have been treated like a hero for his achievement, but he wasn't
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Today, we're going to take a look at the heroic life and tragic death of Alan Turing
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In the 1950s, being homosexual in the United Kingdom was worse than taboo
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It was illegal. Despite knowing this, Turing was fairly open about his sexual orientation
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When he was 39, he started a relationship with a 19-year-old drifter named Arnold Murray
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Murray then burgled Turing's house, who then reported it to the police. His relationship emerged during the investigation
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and Turing was arrested for gross indecency. This indecency law had been on the books for well over a century
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and it was the same statute that Oscar Wilde had been tried under in the 1800s
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Turing was convicted and given an option. He could go to prison or be put on a treatment of female hormones
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He chose the latter. Turing had been instrumental in helping win World War II
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but when it came to his indecency conviction, no one cared. In the eyes of his society at the time, being gay outweighed any of the good he had done
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While he avoided jail time, he was put on probation and had to start taking estrogen pills
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This was, in effect, chemical castration. There were a lot of downsides to the hormone treatment
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Its goal was to make gay people straight, but in reality it just made Turing grow breasts and become impotent
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It could also act as a depressant. While the imitation game shows Turing as broken by his punishment
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in reality, he kept working on various projects. In a more general sense, the severity of Turing's punishment
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provides a window into 1950s Britain's mindset. In 1952, the same year Turing was arrested
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a progressive tabloid of the time published an article calling gay men, among other things, freaks
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and framing gay people as a problem that something needed to be done about. Turing put on a brave face but inside he was suffering Unable to be himself his thoughts turned to ending his life Turing was found on June 8 1954 by his housekeeper He had eaten half of an apple that was laced with cyanide
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The coroner ruled it a suicide. And note, while there is an urban legend
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that this event inspired the Apple logo with a bite taken out, but that legend, it's not true
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That being said, there may actually be more to the story. Friends of Turing, along with his mother
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thought he might have accidentally taken his own life. They claimed he hadn't seemed depressed in the days and weeks leading up to his death
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There was also the fact that he had been experimenting with cyanide in a personal laboratory before he died. They theorized that rather than having used the poison to deliberately
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taint the apple, he may have accidentally gotten some on it. But that's not the end of the story
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either. There is yet another even more interesting theory. Some think that the British government was
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still concerned that he would be forced to leak secrets because of his then well-known sexual
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orientation and that they poisoned him on purpose. Sadly, we may never know the truth
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since he didn't leave a note. After World War II was over, the Cold War started immediately
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Code-breaking was still an important skill, and Turing was able to continue his work
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He was even paid the then huge sum of 5,000 pounds a year to work for the Government
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Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. His triumph was short-lived, however. The U.S. and UK were working closely when it came to government intelligence, and America also had
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a harsh view of homosexuality. The US thought there was a chance that any homosexual man could
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be honey trapped and extorted to share information to prevent being outed. When Turing was arrested
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he lost his security clearance, effectively ending his ability to work as a codebreaker
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It made him furious. Turing knew he was gay from a young age. We know this because he
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developed feelings for a friend when he was in school. The boy's name was Christopher, and while
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they were good friends, Turing's romantic feelings were not reciprocated. Turing later wrote that
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while his friend knew how he felt, he hated him showing it. Nevertheless, both were geeks, and
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they bonded over stuff like math and chemistry. Christopher died very young, and Turing was
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devastated. When he started working at Code Breaking Central at Bletchley Park during World
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War II Turing was pretty open about his preferences Nonetheless at one point he actually proposed to his good friend Joan Clark They did a lot of fun things together like go on dates and see movies but she was still shocked
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when he asked her to marry him. She said yes, but the next day they went for a walk, and he admitted
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to her that he had homosexual tendencies. She was concerned, but didn't end the engagement
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That would happen later, and it was Turing who broke it off. if touring was such a war hero why was he treated so badly afterwards part of it came down to the
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fact that he couldn't actually tell anyone what he had achieved during the conflict everyone who
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worked at bletchley park was sworn to secrecy they couldn't even discuss what they were doing
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with their immediate families some of them died still keeping the secret the truth about how much
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they had achieved was only still emerging well into the 21st century. This meant that when Turing
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was arrested, he couldn't tell the cops that he was the savior of England, the guy who Winston
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Churchill had said made the single biggest contribution to ending the war. Instead
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they just treated him like a perv. It's hard not to believe his punishment would have been
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less dire if he could have told people what he had achieved. Turing was still a graduate student when he first changed history
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He was studying at Princeton and wrote a paper called On Computable Numbers
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with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem. While that might not sound like the most mind-blowingly interesting reading material ever
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it arguably was. It basically invented computer science as we know it
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The paper imagined a machine that could solve as many problems as the human brain
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And the best part was it would be instructed to do different things by putting those instructions on paper tape
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Yeah, while he was still just a student, Turing invented software. His theoretical machine could be told to do anything
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whereas before a computer would be built just to solve one kind of problem
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Turing's universal machine was a computer as we know it today. Before World War II, code breaking was a strictly human affair
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The human brain was the most powerful computer in the world, and it was thought that if people could make up fiendish codes
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other people should be able to figure them out. But then the Germans created the Enigma machine
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The Polish had managed to crack its initial code before the war even started but then the Germans just made it even more complicated Even with 12 people working three shifts around the clock at the British Secret Code deciphering facility at Bletchley Park no one could break it That where Turing
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and computers stepped in. Turing was instrumental in creating a code-breaking machine called
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the bomb. By the end of the war, the bomb figured out everything that the German Navy was saying
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This was huge. Then-General Dwight Eisenhower even said that the work done by Turing and his colleagues
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at Bletchley probably shortened the war by two years. Turing and his computer had saved millions of lives
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In 1950, Turing came up with an important question. Can machines think
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This led to one of the greatest problems ever devised. He wanted to see if computers would one day be so smart
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they could actually trick people into believing they were human. It worked like this
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Someone would sit and ask questions to two participants. One would be a computer and one was a human
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but the questioner wouldn't know which was which. After five minutes, they would try to determine which one was the human
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Then another person would have a turn at questioning and guessing. If more than 30% of the time the questioners guessed the computer was the human
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the machine would have passed the Turing test. For a long time, it seemed like this would be impossible
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Then in 2014, a computer called Eugene that was built to simulate a 13-year-old boy
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managed to fool 33% of the participants. The Turing test had finally been passed, and Turing had helped prove machines could be as smart as humans
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Turing was treated appallingly in his lifetime, but at the very minimum, some of it was righted after he died
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even if it took people a long time. In 2009, there was an online petition calling for an apology
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for how the British government had treated Turing. Then Prime Minister Gordon Brown did offer one
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but many felt that it wasn't enough. Almost 60 years after Turing took his own life
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a royal pardon for his crime was granted by the Queen. That wasn't the end of the good that finally came from Turing's tragic fate
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In 2017, the Turing Law came into effect. This automatically pardoned any men who had been convicted of homosexual acts but had died before
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the laws were changed. Any men who were still alive could seek out and receive a pardon for the same
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Once again, it was Alan Turing to the rescue
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