The Best That Can Be Done For Turing
Posted: 24/12/2013 | Author: The Political Idealist | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Alan Turing, Artificial Intelligence, Bletchley Park, Chris Grayling, Enigma machine, equality, Germany, Homosexuality, Pardon, Royal Pardon, Turing, World War II |8 Comments »It is always a pleasure to be able to share some good news from time to time: the seemingly constant wall of threats, problems and suffering that we are greeted with every time we open a newspaper or turn on the news is not only wearing but it can be dangerous. If we are not careful, we lose faith in human nature, in natural justice and in our ability to make the world a better place. So I was cheered by the granting of a Royal Pardon to one of the greatest mathematicians in British, and indeed human, history, Alan Turing.
English: statue of Alan Turing at University of Surrey (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
My two greatest interests are politics and mathematics: you hear plenty about the former on this blog because it is far more difficult to engage with maths at the level worth talking about. Most people have a set of political ideas, or can debate them competently. If you want to debate anything in maths, you need a university degree to get to a point where there is any scope for ‘opinion’. In any case, what use is advanced number0crunching to anyone? Accordingly, mathematics is seen as an abstract world inhabited by reclusive nerds. This is a tragic misunderstanding. Who better to dispel such a myth than Turing?
Turing’s greatest achievement was as a codebreaker in the British government’s Bletchley Park centre during World War Two. Nazi Germany’s sophisticated encryption of naval instructions with its Enigma machine was enabling it to destroy essential British supply and military ships with devastating effectiveness. Fortunately for the free world, it was a team led by the genius Mr Turing that worked on ‘cracking’ the Enigma code, eventually succeeding by constructing a formidable computer that rendered Germany’s foremost achievement in cryptography ineffective. One should not underestimate the importance of Bletchley Park in the British war effort. Imagine: all the mathematical talent of the country: professors, students, statisticians, engineers, computer specialists (for they were an emergent technology at the time), even linguists and eccentric geniuses, all working together in a common goal. It is a testament to the value of Science that Bletchley Park achieved so much, including the curtailment of the war and the development of modern computing, amongst other innovations.
But this was not the end of Turing’s long list of achievement. His proceeding work in the field of computing at the University of Manchester saw him become an authoritative voice in the theory of computing, and his “Turing test” for identifying Artificial Intelligence remains a widely used, if controversial, benchmark. Unfortunately, Turing was seen as being ‘flawed’, and his country betrayed him accordingly. The trouble was, horror of horrors, that Turing was homosexual. His conviction for what was then a crime condemned him to chemical castration, the effects of which he never recovered from. He committed suicide in 1954.
51 years after his conviction, he has been granted a posthumous Royal Pardon. Of course, that is far too little, too late, but it is the best that we can do in these more enlightened, tolerant times. At least the country he did so much to save no longer condemns him for being who he is.
