Tag: United States Navy
Happy Birthday Alan Turing!
by Greg Stereo on Jun.23, 2010, under Got Nothin'
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Today marks the 98th anniversary of the birth of English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist Alan Turing.
Turing was influential in the development of computer science and providing a formalization of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, playing a significant role in the creation of the modern computer.
Alan Turing also played a significant role in cryptography during World War II, working as a main participant in the efforts at Bletchley Park in England to break German ciphers. The German military had developed an encryption machine known as Enigma, and Turing worked on the problem of the German Enigma machine, collaborating with Dilly Knox, a senior codebreaker. On September 4, 1939, the day after the UK declared war on Germany, Turing reported to Bletchley Park.
Within weeks of arriving at Bletchley Park, Turing had specified an electromechanical machine which could help break Enigma faster than the bombe, named after and building upon the original Polish-designed bomba. The bombe, with an enhancement suggested by mathematician Gordon Welchman, became one of the primary tools used to attack Enigma-protected message traffic.
Professor Jack Good, cryptanalyst working at the time with Turing at Bletchley Park, later said:
Turing’s most important contribution, I think, was of part of the design of the bombe, the cryptanalytic machine. He had the idea that you could use, in effect, a theorem in logic which sounds to the untrained ear rather absurd; namely that from a contradiction, you can deduce everything.
Turing decided to tackle the particularly difficult problem of the German Enigma “because no one else was doing anything about it and I could have it to myself”. In December 1939, Turing solved the essential part of the naval indicator system, which was more complex than the indicator systems used by the other services.
The same night that he solved the naval indicator system, he conceived the idea of Banburismus, a Bayesian statistical technique to assist in breaking naval Enigma, “though I was not sure that it would work in practice, and was not in fact sure until some days had actually broken”. Banburismus could rule out certain orders of the Enigma rotors, reducing the time required to test settings on the bombes.
Turing traveled to the United States in November 1942 and worked with U.S. Navy cryptanalysts on Naval Enigma and bombe construction in Washington, and assisted at Bell Labs with the development of secure speech devices. He returned to Bletchley Park in March 1943.
From 1945 to 1947 he worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he worked on the design of the ACE (Automatic Computing Engine). He presented a paper on February 19, 1946, which was the first detailed design of a stored-program computer. Although ACE was a feasible design, the secrecy surrounding the wartime work at Bletchley Park led to delays in starting the project and Turing became disillusioned. In late 1947 he returned to Cambridge for a sabbatical year. While he was at Cambridge, the Pilot ACE was built in his absence. It executed its first program on 10 May 1950.
In 1948, Turing, working with his former undergraduate colleague, D. G. Champernowne, began writing a chess program for a computer that did not yet exist. In 1952, lacking a computer powerful enough to run the program, Turing played a game in which he simulated the computer, taking about half an hour per move. The game was recorded. The program lost to Turing’s colleague Alick Glennie, although it is rumored that it won a game against Champernowne’s wife.
This Turing test was a significant and characteristically provocative contribution to the debate regarding artificial intelligence.
Turing’s personal life caused him great trouble during his time. His homosexuality resulted in a criminal prosecution in 1952—homosexual acts were illegal in the United Kingdom at that time—and he accepted treatment with female hormones and chemical castration as an alternative to prison. He died in 1954, several weeks before his 42nd birthday, from an apparently self-administered cyanide poisoning, although his mother (and some others) considered his death to be accidental. On September 10, 2009, following an Internet campaign, then-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for the way in which Turing was treated after the war. Brown issued a statement which read in part:
Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him … So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.
Turing has been honored in various ways in Manchester, England, the city where he worked towards the end of his life. In 1994, a stretch of road (the Manchester city intermediate ring road) was named Alan Turing Way. A bridge carrying this road was widened, and carries the name Alan Turing Bridge. A statue of Turing was unveiled in Manchester on June 23, 2001. It is in Sackville Park, between the University of Manchester building on Whitworth Street and the Canal Street gay village. The statue depicts the “father of modern computing” sitting on a bench at a central position in the park. The statue was unveiled on Turing’s birthday.
In 1999, Time Magazine named Turing as one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century for his role in the creation of the modern computer, and stated:
The fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine.
In 2002, Turing was ranked twenty-first on the BBC nationwide poll of the 100 Greatest Britons.
Turing’s epitaph reads:
Hyperboloids of wondrous Light
Rolling for aye through Space and Time
Harbour those Waves which somehow Might
Play out God’s holy pantomime
Happy Birthday, and much respect and appreciation for all of your work, Alan Turing!
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