alan turing

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Alan Turning

Alan Turning is known to be a pioneer of many facets of the computer age. The digital computer, artificial intelligence, memory subroutines, the Turning Machine, the Turing Test, and the application of algorithms to computers are all ideas somehow related to this man.

Alan Mathison Turing was born in Paddington, London, on June 23, 1912. He was a precocious child and began his interests in science and mathematics at a young age, but was never concerned about other right-brain classes such as English. This continued until an important friend of his passed away and set Turing on a path to achieve what his friend could no longer accomplish. When his friend Christopher Morcom died, Turing was launched into thoughts in physics about the physical mind being embodied in matter and whether quantum-mechanical theory affects the traditional problem of mind and matter. Many say today that this was the beginnings of Turing’s Turning Machine and the test still used today for artificial intelligence, the Turing Test.

Soon after his public schooling Turing began working on his undergraduate at King’s College. Here he became interested in the readings of Von Neumann’s quests into the logical foundations of quantum mechanics. Through these readings Turing was believed to structure his thinking from the emotional states that he had been suffering from to a more valid form of thought.

Turing earned a fellowship at King’s college and the following year the Smith’s Prize for his work in probability theory. Afterward, he chose a path away from pure math into mathematical logic and began to work on solving the Entscheidungsproblem, a problem in decidability. This was an attempt to prove that there was a method by which any given mathematical assertion was provable. As he began to dive in to this he worked on first defining what a method was. In doing so he began what today is called the Turing Machine. The Turing Machine is a three-fold inspiration composed of logical instructions, the action of the mind, and a machine which can in principle be embodied in a practical physical form. It is the application of an algorithm embodied in a finite state machine.

The Turing Machine is a simple kind of computer. It is limited to reading and writing symbols on a tape and moving the tape along to the left or right. The tape is marke...

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...at today is known as the Turing Test. This was a test where a person would ask questions from both a human and a machine without knowing which was which. If after a reasonable amount of time the difference between the two was not obvious, then the machine was thought to be somewhat intelligent. A version of this test is still used today by the Boston Museum of Computers to host a contest of the best artificial machines for the Loebner Prize.

Turing continued working on the digital computer and ideas in artificial intelligence until he died on June 7, 1954. He was found with a half-eaten apple loaded with cyanide, the half-eaten apple a familiar symbol of innocence. Some say he had committed suicide over an embarrassing incident with a 19-year old student , while his mother says he was just performing another experiment with household chemicals and became careless. Whichever it may be, Alan Turing passed away and left the world with many raw ideas to work out. In my opinion, the biggest contribution that he left with us was his idea of a single machine running off a finite number of algorithms to perform multiple tasks. This being the vision of the computers we all use today.

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