Alan Turing, Condemned Code Breaker and Computer Visionary

Alan Cowell, Overlooked No More: Alan Turing, Condemned Code Breaker and Computer Visionary, The New York Times, June 5, 2019.

His genius embraced the first visions of modern computing and produced seminal insights into what became known as “artificial intelligence.” As one of the most influential code breakers of World War II, his cryptology yielded intelligence believed to have hastened the Allied victory. 

But, at his death several years later, much of his secretive wartime accomplishments remained classified, far from public view in a nation seized by the security concerns of the Cold War. Instead, by the narrow standards of his day, his reputation was sullied. 

On June 7, 1954, Alan Turing, a British mathematician who has since been acknowledged as one the most innovative and powerful thinkers of the 20th century — sometimes called the progenitor of modern computing — died as a criminal, having been convicted under Victorian laws as a homosexual and forced to endure chemical castration. Britain didn’t take its first steps toward decriminalizing homosexuality until 1967. 

Only in 2009 did the government apologize for his treatment. 

“We’re sorry — you deserved so much better,” said Gordon Brown, then the prime minister. “Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted, as he was, under homophobic laws were treated terribly.” 

And only in 2013 did Queen Elizabeth II grant Turing a royal pardon, 59 years after a housekeeper found his body at his home at Wilmslow, near Manchester, in northwest England....

Credit for the creation of the first functioning computer in 1946 went to the researchers John Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly for their machine the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or Eniac, which they had developed at the University of Pennsylvania during World War II.

But Turing’s notions preceded the Eniac. He conceived what became known as the universal Turing machine, which envisioned “one machine for all possible tasks” — essentially computers as we know them today, Andrew Hodges, Turing’s biographer, wrote in a condensed version of his 1983 book, “Alan Turing: The Enigma.” 

uring’s vision, Hodges said, was that one machine could “be turned to any well-defined task by being supplied with the appropriate program.” 

He added, “The universal Turing machine naturally exploits what was later seen as the ‘stored program’ concept essential to the modern computer: It embodies the crucial 20th century insight that symbols representing instructions are no different in kind from symbols representing numbers.” 

Later, technology that emerged from the Manhattan Project, the United States-led effort to develop the atom bomb, also relied on Turing’s ideas. 

“What had begun as a British idea was scaled up to industrial size by the Americans,” David Kaiser, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in 2012 in The London Review of Books.