Image a world without computers – no mobile phones, no swipe cards, no ATMs.
The heartbeat of a premature baby cannot be accurately monitored; air travel is for the privileged few since all planes must be directed manually from the ground; reporting of wars in far off countries could be prevented by simply cutting a telephone wire.
It is thanks to the pioneering work of the British mathematician Alan Turing, regarded as the “father of computer science”, that we enjoy the technological advances that we have today and 2012 sees the centenary of his birth.
As part of a global yearlong celebration of his life, and ground breaking work, the University of Edinburgh will be hosting a public lecture given by British theoretical physicist and author Professor Jim Al-Khalili of the University of Surrey.
Professor Al-Khalili is a holder of the Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize for science communication, an Honorary Fellow of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, lecturing widely around the world.
The talk, Alan Turing: Legacy of a Code Breaker, will be held on Thursday 10th May 2012 as part of Edinburgh’s T100 celebrations and will examine Turing’s work on cryptanalysis and the cracking of the German Enigma Code during the Second World War.
Also covered will be the work Turing undertook as a young graduate student at King’s College, Cambridge in 1935/36 where, following a lecture, he embarked on the quest to develop a machine that would undertake complex mathematical calculations.
It was this work that led him to set down the formal rules that direct the way every computer code ever written actually work.
In conjunction with the Royal Society of Edinburgh an artificial intelligence project, Twit-test, has been launched using Twitter, the social network application. Working with local schools it will look at how intelligence is viewed, conveyed and received in education and social environments.
Artificial Intelligence was a particular interest of Turing and he once said, “A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.”
T100 will also host a research symposium that will consider four key topics in Turing’s work: Artificial Intelligence; Computer Hardware and modelling the brain; Computability and Algorithms; and Morphogenesis, the biological process that allows organisms to develop their shape, perhaps more widely understood as “how the zebra got its stripes”.
Experts in biological sciences and chemistry, as well as those in computer and information science, will examine Turing’s legacy and current research on these topics, which as the Royal Society of Edinburgh states “represent the rich diversity of Turing’s legacy, in Informatics and beyond.”
Yet Turing life was ultimately a tragic one, and the genius who was central to the team of secret code breakers at Bletchley Park ended his life, by his own hand, in Manchester two weeks short of his fortieth birthday.
Famously completely absorbed by his work he was regarded as something of an eccentric and was could appear detached from the outside world. At Bletchley he was reported to have chained his coffee mug to a radiator to prevent is “misappropriation”.
After his successes in code breaking in World War 2 Turing settled into a life of research at the University of Manchester, joining Max Newman's Computing Laboratory in 1948, where he assisted in the development of the Manchester computers and became interested in morphogenesis.
However Britain in the 1950’s was a country where homosexual relationships were illegal and when in 1951 Turing reported a theft from his home to the police he also mentioned his relationship with the suspected thief.
Turing was prosecuted for his homosexuality, his name and address published in the press as part of the court reporting.
To avoid a prison sentence he was offered the option of chemical castration, where he had to submit to a series of injection of female hormones to eliminate his sex drive.
He suffered extreme physical and mental side effects; most distressingly it clouded his ability to think and analysis clearly, leading to depression.
On the 7th June 1954 he was found dead at home. The cause of death was determined to be cyanide poisoning, a tainted half-eaten apple by his bedside.
In 2009 a petition by British computer programmer John Graham-Cummings was launched to seek an apology for the manner in which Turing had been treated by the authorities after the vital work he had performed during World War 2.
The petition quickly received thousands of signatures and in September 2009 Gordon Brown, the then Prime Minster, released a statement condemning the treatment of Turing, however an attempt to posthumously overturn the 1951 indecency conviction has since been turned down.
Colin Macfarlane, Director of Stonewall Scotland said, “It is very sad that historically so many people have been persecuted because of their sexual orientation and we have come along the way in the past fifty years.
He added, “We know, however that sadly to this day people are discriminated against in the workplace because of their sexual orientation and Stonewall Scotland is working hard to ensure that LBG and T people be treated with the respect and dignity that everyone deserves.”
In 2012 the wider scientific community is keen to use Turning’s centennial to raise public awareness of this long admired but cruelly neglected visionary of the 20th century.
“Alan Turing’s big idea was to not just copy nature but to burrow inside and work out how to build creative processes from basic mechanisms,” says Professor Barry Cooper of the University of Leeds, chair of the Turing Centenary Advisory Committee who is coordinating the 2012 centenary events.
An editor of Alan Turing: His Work and Impact, a new book providing an overview of the celebrated mathematicians work Professor Cooper added, “He was the visionary anticipator of today’s IT connected world.”
Major events planned for the 2012 celebrations include an exhibition on Turing at the Science Museum in London and the Edinburgh International Technology Festival in August.
Professor Cooper concluded, “Alan Turing pointed the way to making machines intelligent enough to do all the amazing things we are so dependent on today.”
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