Alan Turing By Mathijs Beckers A3G

I chose Alan Turing because I want to work in technology when I’m older and he is basically the
father of technology. I also like gaming on my computer and he is the father of the computer so that
was also a clear choice. What also helped was a film that was about to fight against a German enigma
which the allied forces couldn’t crack, if they did they could decipher messages from the axis which
could save the lives of a lot of soldiers.(85)

His life
Alan Turing was born in Paddington, London, on 23 June 1912 in
England. His full name was Alan Mathison Turing. Turing’s father,
Julius Mathison Turing, served the British Indian Civil Service where
he had met Turing’s mother, Ethel Sara Stoney, who was the
daughter of the chief railway engineer in the Madras Presidency.
Alan Turing also had an older brother, John Turing. Turing grew up in
the upper-middle-class, and did not see his parents much.

Alan started school at an age of six at St Micheal’s. The school quickly noticed his talents for
Mathematics.(94)

Later he went to Hazlehurst Preparatory School. Here his parents got a letter from the headmaster in
which stood: "I hope he will not fall between two stools. If he is to stay at public school,
he must aim at becoming educated. If he is to be solely a Scientific Specialist, he is
wasting his time at a public school". After that, at the age of 13, he went to Sherburne School.
Here he met Christopher Morcom who people say was the first love of Turing,This wasn’t popular
because home sexuality was considered a crime back then. They both shared a interest in
mathematics and science. Turing didn’t have much passion for other classes like English opposed to
Morcom. 2 Years later, Morcom died which left Turing in great grief. This resulted in Turing wanting
to do what they both planned on doing together even more, going to King’s College in Cambridge
.(153)

Turing studies as an undergraduate at King’s College Cambridge. He worked harder for his study
because of Morcom’s death. He was inspired by other mathematicians like von Neumann and A. S.
Eddington where he was the best a mathematics and was awarded first-class honours in
mathematics. In his college years he invented the Turing Machine in his head, a complicated machine
which could solve anything mathematical. While attending King’s College, Alan Turing was involved
with the Anti-war movement of 1933, although he was not deeply into politics. The Anti-war
movement that Turing was a member off was in between the two world wars. In the 1930s, people
rebelled against further war because of the consequences of the First World War. Because the First
World War caused great casualties and suffering. However he didn’t attend many events against the
war.(139)
When Britain joined Wold War 2. The Government Code and Cypher School hired Turing. He was
responsible for German Naval cryptanalysis. In order to crack the enigma which the Germans used
he improved a pre war Polish bombe method together with his colleague Gordon Wlechman, a
machine that could discover the setting for the enigma, a German inscription device. Without this
machine the allied forces wouldn’t have been able to decipher German messages. And many soldiers
could have died because of lack of enemy information. Turing then build the machine called the
Bombe to break the code, resulting in saving a lot of British troops and civilians about 14 million lives,
more than anyone has ever saved, and winning the war. His machine has shortened the war roughly
about 2 years. Turing shared his work with other allied forces which resulted in different versions of
the bombe. (147)

After the war Turing worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he continued making
machine like his Automatic Computing Engine which was one of the first designs for a computer.
Later he joined Max Newman’s Computing Machine Laboratory at the Victoria University of
Manchester, here he helped design more machines like the Manchester computers. Turing also
became interested in mathematical biology. He wrote a paper about chemical basis of
morphogenesis and he predicted the oscillating chemical reactions for example: Belousov-
Zhabotinsky reaction. (81)

He also continued his work for the Universal Turing Machine with which he started before the
second world war. The machine was supposed to perform a computational task. The result was a
machine that could perform multiple tasks. Another of Turing’s contribution is the Turing Test. The
Turing Test comes from Turing’s Computing Machinery and Intelligence paper written in 1950. Turing
created a hypothesis that a Turing machine can be created to have intelligence. According to John M.
Kowalik: “the test consisted of a person asking questions via keyboard to both a person and an
intelligent machine. He believed that if the person could not tell the machine apart from the person
after a reasonable amount of time, the machine was somewhat intelligent”. The Turing Test
challenges the idea of an intelligent machine, or at least convince a human it has intelligence. The
Turing Test opened a new field of study in computer science. Turing gave future computer scientists
the ambitious idea of artificial intelligence. Although it was not achieved in his lifetime, today we
have many applications of artificial intelligence that are all based on the fundamental idea of the
Turing Test. (193)

One day he came home and some of his stuff were gone, he called the cops and when they came
they asked if he had any idea who would have robbed him. Turing answered that his boyfriend could
have stolen his stuff. The cops arrested Turing on charge of gross indecency because he was homo
sexual, which was a criminal offence in Britain. He was given the choice: Prison or Prohibition ,which
held in that he would undergo a hormone treatment, which was thought to cure home sexuality. He
chose the prohibition. Because of the treatment he became more depressed resulting in him killing
himself. Inspired of snow white, he injected a apple with cyanide in 1954 and ate it.(120)
 In conclusion, Alan Turing deserved much appreciation for his works in his lifetime but didn’t get it.
Turing’s invention of the Bombe allowed the British to decipher the Enigma and led to victory for the
Allied forces. The Universal Turing machine was the first concept of the modern computer. The
Turing Test led to future work by computer scientists in artificial intelligence. Turing had a grand
vision for how machines could aid us in the future.(76)

Sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Btqro3544p8 ,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Early_life_and_education

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2084970/

Assignment B

A:Hello

I:hey, how are you?

A:I’m doing good.

I:So when were you born?

A: I was born in London on 23 June 1912

I: tell me more about your family.

A: My father is Julius Mathison Turing, he served in the British Indian Civil Service where he also met
my mother: Ethel Sara Stoney. I also have a big brother John Turing he wasn’t the smartest but his
hart was big.

I:how was your youth?

A: we were an upper-middle-class family so we didn’t have it so bad, I usually didn’t see my parents a
lot because they were both working a lot of the time. I spend a lot of my time with my brother or
reading books about mathematics.

I: How did you became so interested in mathematics?

A: On one of my birthdays I got a book about math problems from an aunt and to my surprise I liked
it. The next birthday I asked my family for more books and that how it began.

I: is this the reason you were so far ahead of the other kids of your school?

A:i believe it had something to do with it, but I don’t think that was the sole reason. I think it also had
to do with my brain just being better at mathematical and science things then the other kids.

I: okay, and I heard you had a boyfriend.

A: Yeah. You mean Christopher Morcom, I will never forget him. We did most things together. We
even already planned our steps together like how we were both going to King’s College at
Cambridge. But unfortunately he died 2 years after we met........... Sorry this is hard for me.

I: I understand, I heard you were real close

A: We were. Even in death he helped me.

I: What do you mean?

A: because of his death I became more focused on my study because we had planned it together, I
didn’t want to fail him.

I: okay, that is interesting.

I: Was that your only extra motivation or were there more persons?

A: of course my family was a big motivation but I would say von Neumann and A. S. Eddington were
one of the bigger motivators, I wanted to be like them.

I:Now lets go to when you were drafted for Government Code and Cypher School.

A:Yes, they were looking for young people with a high intellect and passion for mathematic so they
made a puzzle for the Newspaper. From the people who solved the puzzle they looked at our records
and they came across me. At first they didn’t believe the information was right so they contacted me
and said they wanted a meeting. Then i told them the information was right and they were amazed.

They said I could lead a group of other people to crack a Code which the Germans used that was
made by a enigma. Our work didn’t go well because the code changes every day so all our progress
would be lost the next day.

I: So how did you finally break the code?

A:Simply: by cracking the key

I: But you said it changed every day.

A: Yes, it was impossible to crack. But then I knew it: it was a machine made by the polish before the
war: the Bombe. Me and my colleague, Gordon Wlechman, improved the design and it worked.

Every day the machine could decipher the enigma code in a hour or 2.

I: that’s very fast for something that should have been impossible to crack

A: Indeed, we saved around 14 million people with this machine

I: Thank you so much for this interview

A: no problem