The Machine That Could Think

Alan Mathison Turing died on June 7, 1954, at 41, in his home in Wilmslow, England. Cyanide poisoning. Near his bed was an apple with a bite taken out, never tested for poison. The coroner ruled suicide. His mother insisted accident. Two years earlier, he had been convicted of gross indecency for being gay, subjected to chemical castration, and stripped of his security clearance.

During the war, Turing led the Bletchley Park team that broke Germany's Enigma cipher. He designed the Bombe, an electromechanical device testing thousands of configurations per hour. Historians estimate his work shortened the war by two years and saved millions of lives.

the enigma machine, used by nazi germany to encrypt military communications -- broken by turing and the team at bletchley park. source: wikimedia commons

Before the war, Turing had laid the theoretical foundation for modern computing. In 1936, "On Computable Numbers" described an imaginary machine simulating any algorithm -- now called a Turing machine. The first stored-program computer, built in 1948, was a physical realization of that concept. In 1950, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" proposed the Turing Test: if a human cannot distinguish machine from person through conversation, the machine can think. He also modeled how chemical reactions produce patterns in biology -- stripes on zebras, spots on leopards.

In 2013, Queen Elizabeth granted Turing a royal pardon. In 2021, his face appeared on the 50-pound note. Too late. Every device that runs software, every algorithm, every neural network exists in the space Turing opened. The apple, the poison, the silence.