Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm far A Dowdy and I'm Deblina chokoate boarding, and
Speaker 1: today we're going to be talking about Alan Turing. And
Speaker 1: he's considered the father of computer science, the father of
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence, and also one of the most important wartime
Speaker 1: code breakers in World War Two. So quite a resume
Speaker 1: just right off the bat there, and for listeners with
Speaker 1: a more literary bent, he's also been called the Shelley
Speaker 1: of science, which is a name I kind of took
Speaker 1: a shine to you. Yeah, and others have too. He's
Speaker 1: been a really popular podcast suggestion, though his resumes focus
Speaker 1: on math and technology has always kind of scared us
Speaker 1: off a little bit. I think, I mean things like
Speaker 1: number theory, probability, computer programs, stung our usual subject matter stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm honestly a little scared to get into too deeply.
Speaker 1: But fortunately some of his work really transcends the arcane.
Speaker 1: It's it's understandable if you put some effort into it.
Speaker 1: And there's a wealth of biographical materials to which I
Speaker 1: feel like the last few podcasts I've done that has
Speaker 1: not been the case, So it was a little it
Speaker 1: was a little refreshing really to research Alan Turning and
Speaker 1: know that there's so much out there about this man.
Speaker 1: There are m I T lectures, there's a digital archive
Speaker 1: at Alan Turing dot net. Their articles in just about
Speaker 1: every science journal you can name, and there's a house
Speaker 1: Stuff Works podcast. Yeah, Jonathan and Chris talked about Turin's
Speaker 1: life less fall on tech stuff and so that's a
Speaker 1: great place to turn if you want to a little
Speaker 1: more of an in depth discussion on programming. Yeah, specifically,
Speaker 1: I was glad though that even they admitted that the
Speaker 1: math was kind of tricky to discuss. It's just so
Speaker 1: high level. But they do really do a good job
Speaker 1: covering the programming and in that side of Turning story.
Speaker 1: But it's also June, which is Pride Month, and that's
Speaker 1: why we've picked Turing for today's topic. He's a great,
Speaker 1: if tragic example of a remarkable man, really a genius
Speaker 1: whose life was so clearly defined by his homosexuality and
Speaker 1: reminded me a lot of Oscar Wilde, who Katie and
Speaker 1: I covered last year for Pride Month. He was another
Speaker 1: man who was really destroyed by prejudice at the absolute
Speaker 1: height of his achievement. So it's a great story to
Speaker 1: learn about, and it's it's good to know about Turing's achievements,
Speaker 1: but it is also a really, really sad story. Yeah
Speaker 1: it is. But before we get to that, we're going
Speaker 1: to start sort of with the beginnings of his life.
Speaker 1: Alan Mathieson Turing was born June nine, twelve in London
Speaker 1: to a member of the Indian civil service. His father
Speaker 1: actually served in the Madrass presidency and his mother's father
Speaker 1: was the chief engineer of the Madrass railways. But Turning
Speaker 1: didn't grow up in India. Instead, his parents had the
Speaker 1: kids fostered in British homes, which, as you can imagine,
Speaker 1: was pretty lonely, and his parents didn't even come back
Speaker 1: to England until nine. Yeah, not until his dad retired.
Speaker 1: So he spent prep school trying to do as much
Speaker 1: science and math as he could get away with, which
Speaker 1: at the time it wasn't really the agenda. I guess
Speaker 1: he would be an outstanding student these days, but his
Speaker 1: skepticism and his curiosity also sometimes got him in trouble
Speaker 1: with with the authority figures at school. But in nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty eight, he had his first experience of true intellectual stimulation.
Speaker 1: He made friends with a boy who was one year
Speaker 1: ahead of him, Christopher more Cum and Jonathan and Chris.
Speaker 1: The way they explained this, I really liked it the
Speaker 1: way they explained the friendship. Essentially, the two kids could
Speaker 1: bounce ideas off of each other and combine what they
Speaker 1: knew and really come away from it with a deeper understanding.
Speaker 1: So sort of a friendship of two minds that was
Speaker 1: really influential in the young Turing's life. Yeah. So when
Speaker 1: Marcum died suddenly in nineteen third, the teenage Churing was
Speaker 1: left wondering what happened to Markham's consciousness. He was pretty
Speaker 1: devastated and and wanted to explore that idea further. So
Speaker 1: for three years he wrote letters to Markham's mother trying
Speaker 1: to figure out the relationship between mind and matter. And
Speaker 1: that's a quest that would later define his work and
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence, which you're going to talk about a little
Speaker 1: more in a few minutes. Yeah, I will definitely be
Speaker 1: talking about that. But in October nine, so well, he's
Speaker 1: really in the middle of his grief in and this
Speaker 1: new look into the relationship between mind and matter. He
Speaker 1: goes off to college King's College, Cambridge, and of course
Speaker 1: he studies math, and it was really a different inspiring
Speaker 1: environment for him to one where he could think creatively.
Speaker 1: He could study things like philosophy and economics and surround
Speaker 1: himself by intelligent people, and also recognized his own sexuality,
Speaker 1: and he socialized with some of the anti war intellectual circle.
Speaker 1: But his politics weren't really sharply defined during this period.
Speaker 1: His in recreation was athletic. He liked running and rowing
Speaker 1: and failing, and of course doing math. Yeah, by nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty four he had received a distinguished degree, and by
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty five, at age twenty two, he got a
Speaker 1: fellowship to King's College. So well on this intellectual path
Speaker 1: of his. But it was in nineteen thirty five that
Speaker 1: Turing started tackling and intriguing mathematical question, and that's the
Speaker 1: question of decidability. And during that process he envisions a
Speaker 1: machine that could complete computational operations just like the human brain.
Speaker 1: The Turing machine at that point was purely theoretical, but
Speaker 1: it could perform any kind of operation that was programmed
Speaker 1: to do play chess, calculate numbers, anything like that, and
Speaker 1: that idea develops into the idea of a universal Turing
Speaker 1: machine which could handle any task, and individual touring machine could. So,
Speaker 1: for example, if the Turing machine is the early computer program,
Speaker 1: the universal machine would be the early computer. The one
Speaker 1: machine that can do any task is programmed to do. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And a guy named b Jack Copeland described the significance
Speaker 1: of this creation in an M I. T. Lecture. And
Speaker 1: it really helped me understand how important it was because
Speaker 1: it might seem a little old hat if you if
Speaker 1: you just look at it like a computer or computer program,
Speaker 1: he said. Nowadays, when nearly everyone owns the physical realization
Speaker 1: of a universal turning machine, Turing's idea of a one
Speaker 1: stop shop computing machine is apt to seem as obvious
Speaker 1: as the wheel. But in nineteen thirty six, engineers thought
Speaker 1: in terms of building specific machines for particular purposes. So
Speaker 1: this was really a revolutionary idea at the time, and
Speaker 1: of course some people realized that, but not everyone knew
Speaker 1: the full implications of of what this idea would eventually
Speaker 1: come to. Yeah, And it would be more than a
Speaker 1: decade before the physical realization of a turning machine was
Speaker 1: actually built. Until then, Touring continuing continued his studies at
Speaker 1: Princeton and then returned to England and Cambridge before the
Speaker 1: outbreak of World War two, and then on the first
Speaker 1: full day of the war he joined the Government Code
Speaker 1: and Cipher School, whose headquarters were at the now famous
Speaker 1: Bletchley Park in London. Yeah, and the g CCS was
Speaker 1: busy bringing together all of the country's top minds at
Speaker 1: this point, so mathematicians like Touring, but also chess players
Speaker 1: and egyptologists, all sorts of smart people with different kinds
Speaker 1: of skills, anyone who they hoped might lend insight into
Speaker 1: breaking German codes, which was what they were all about
Speaker 1: in the chief Code at the time. The one that
Speaker 1: was really giving them the most trouble was the Enigma,
Speaker 1: and Polish Cryptanalysis had been working on the Enigma for
Speaker 1: a really long time since nineteen thirty two, and they
Speaker 1: had created a code breaking machine called the Bomba a
Speaker 1: few years after that, but by nineteen thirty nine, Touring
Speaker 1: and others were helping to create a new machine, one
Speaker 1: that could adapt to the Enigma because it got to
Speaker 1: where the Germans were changing the codes every twenty four
Speaker 1: hours pretty much. So he helped develop a new machine
Speaker 1: called the Bomb, which could DECIPHERLOFBAFA Enigma communications. There's a
Speaker 1: really neat British Heritage article by Gene Paskey about Bletchley Park,
Speaker 1: which I recommend if you just sort of want to
Speaker 1: get a picture of it. We were actually talking about
Speaker 1: this might be a good episode in itself, but I
Speaker 1: hope we don't give too much away. It nicely describes
Speaker 1: rooms full of these machines and the operators who maintain them.
Speaker 1: And in case you think that they're little, tiny devices
Speaker 1: like we're used to today, little electronic devices, they're not
Speaker 1: in any sense like that. They are large mechanical machines
Speaker 1: that required a lot of upkeep. They had to be
Speaker 1: kept clean, um they were They took up the room essentially.
Speaker 1: So these really big machines. They helped crack the Air
Speaker 1: Force Enigma, but the German naval Enigma was kind of
Speaker 1: a tougher nut to crack and also critical for winning
Speaker 1: the Battle of the Atlantic. So Turing had worked out
Speaker 1: part of the code in nineteen thirty nine, but the
Speaker 1: big break in the situation came courtesy of a Royal
Speaker 1: Navy when they captured an Enigma machine and code book
Speaker 1: from a U boat, so by June one U boat
Speaker 1: traffic was decipherable. Yeah, they have cracked the code, and
Speaker 1: by early nineteen forty two, Bletchley Park was decoding thirty
Speaker 1: nine thousand German transmissions a month, and of course some
Speaker 1: of those were complaints about the underwear splitting down the
Speaker 1: middle is in that type of thing, but also some
Speaker 1: really serious communications in there. It rose to an eventual
Speaker 1: eighty four thousand transmissions a month, so pretty astonishing figure.
Speaker 1: And with the nineteen forty three breaking of Germany's high
Speaker 1: level binary teleprinter code, which was what Hitler himself used,
Speaker 1: and high members of his government Um Churchill, was able
Speaker 1: to read Hitler's mail before Hitler could read it. According
Speaker 1: to Posh's article, something I thought was interesting and something
Speaker 1: I never knew about Bletchley Park, I mean neither. But
Speaker 1: it turns out the combined efforts of Bletchley Park shortened
Speaker 1: the war by two years, and for his part, Turing
Speaker 1: received the Order of the British Empire, which was one
Speaker 1: of the most prestigious awards you could get. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so after the war he's looking for a new job,
Speaker 1: and he was recruited to the National Physics laboratory and
Speaker 1: the task, conveniently enough was to design and build an
Speaker 1: electronic computer, so essentially a real Turing machine. Seems like
Speaker 1: just the guy to bring in to do this, And
Speaker 1: he called his new design the Automatic Computing Engine, which
Speaker 1: has the lovely acronym ACE. But it made a good computer, uh,
Speaker 1: and it was a really ambitious advanced design it. If
Speaker 1: it had been built, it would have had the memory
Speaker 1: capacity of an early MAX So that's pretty astounding if
Speaker 1: you consider this immediately after a World War two. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but things moved more slowly than they had at Bletchley Park.
Speaker 1: There was lots of red tape to deal with, and
Speaker 1: Turing's colleagues thought that the original ACE design was too
Speaker 1: much and opted for a smaller machine, which was called
Speaker 1: the Pilot Model ACE. So part of the problem here
Speaker 1: was that Turing's wartime achievements were unrecognized due to their secrecy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he couldn't go out and say, well, guys, at Bletchley Park,
Speaker 1: I did this. I mean, he couldn't talk about any
Speaker 1: of that stuff. Yeah, he couldn't brag on himself. So
Speaker 1: to relieve the frustration and the stress of the situation,
Speaker 1: he started long distance running and it took an injury
Speaker 1: actually to prevent him from qualifying for the ninety eight
Speaker 1: Olympic marathon team. So he was pretty good at it.
Speaker 1: It's really good at it. It's it's one of those
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's like a cherry on top for
Speaker 1: somebody with so many talents that they would also be
Speaker 1: an amazing athlete. Well, I was going to say, it's
Speaker 1: almost not fair, but you're kinder than I am, obviously. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: whatever way you look at it. But by this point,
Speaker 1: delays meant that the National Physics Laboratory wasn't going to
Speaker 1: be the first place that built the first working electronics
Speaker 1: stored program digital computer. That honor went to Manchester University
Speaker 1: and it happened in June. So Turing obviously frustrated by
Speaker 1: his his time at the National Physics Laboratory, and they
Speaker 1: got beat out. Yeah, they got beat out. He wasn't
Speaker 1: really listened to his achievements, and accomplishments weren't really appreciated
Speaker 1: to the the level they deserved to be. So he
Speaker 1: went to work in Manchester, oddly enough as the deputy director,
Speaker 1: even though there was no director of the program. Kind
Speaker 1: of a strange little detail there. Yeah, but he designed
Speaker 1: the programming system of the Ferronti Mark one, the first
Speaker 1: commercially available digital electronic computer, so hopefully that was a
Speaker 1: little solace for him. Consolation program yeah. Um. And it
Speaker 1: was also during his time at Manchester that Turing started
Speaker 1: to hypothesize about what would later be known as artificial intelligence,
Speaker 1: and and I thought it was it was interesting, and
Speaker 1: this is something that's kind of, I guess, difficult for
Speaker 1: me to talk about with my limited knowledge of computer
Speaker 1: programming and science. I just work on a computer. I
Speaker 1: don't know what happens inside. But I was impressed that, Um,
Speaker 1: even though he had he had the skill to work
Speaker 1: on developing this field, he put the machine to use
Speaker 1: right away. So I'm sure he was still considering about
Speaker 1: how it could be advanced. But he started looking for
Speaker 1: ways to use the Ferronti Mark one, which I thought
Speaker 1: was was pretty neat. Yeah. It kind of went back
Speaker 1: to his old interest in the connection between mind and matter,
Speaker 1: and in nineteen fifty Touring wrote a paper called Computing,
Speaker 1: Machinery and Intelligence in the journal Mind. In it, he
Speaker 1: proposed something called an imitation test. Today that's called the
Speaker 1: Turing test, and the test basically provided a way to
Speaker 1: judge the intelligence of a machine without bias. So an interrogator,
Speaker 1: for example, would sit in an isolated room from two subjects,
Speaker 1: one a person, one a machine, and the interrogator would
Speaker 1: ask them both questions, and if the interrogator couldn't tell
Speaker 1: who was who, then that meant the machine was thinking. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it had intelligence in some definable way. And Turing even
Speaker 1: predicted he had a lot of confidence in computers. He
Speaker 1: predicted that by the year two thousand, a computer would
Speaker 1: be so good at this game this, this Turing test,
Speaker 1: an interrogator would not have more than a seventy percent
Speaker 1: chance of correctly identifying who is who after five minutes.
Speaker 1: And that is a very ambitious goal because according to
Speaker 1: Encyclopedia Britannica, no computer today has even come close to
Speaker 1: that standard. But Turing really he did have a lot
Speaker 1: of hopes for computers. Yeah. He also hypothesized that one day, quote,
Speaker 1: ladies would take their computers for walks in the park
Speaker 1: and tell each other, my little computer said such a
Speaker 1: funny thing in the morning. I think we're a little
Speaker 1: closer to that one than the seventy percent goal. Maybe
Speaker 1: I don't know. I still like my doggy though. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Turing continued to study artificial intelligence, but also stuff
Speaker 1: like biological growth with the FRONTI Mark one I said
Speaker 1: that he really did put that sheen too good youth,
Speaker 1: and his career was expanding into these different subject areas
Speaker 1: and his recognition was also growing. He was elected as
Speaker 1: a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in March
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty one. That's another really prestigious honor. He was
Speaker 1: appointed to Readership in the Theory of Computing at Manchester,
Speaker 1: which sounds like a very modern title. But in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty two things took a turn for the worse in
Speaker 1: his life after a break in in his Manchester home
Speaker 1: and he told the police that he thought the burglar
Speaker 1: was probably connected to a man he was quote having
Speaker 1: an affair with, and he had been pretty open about
Speaker 1: his sexuality since college. During his Bletchley Park days, he
Speaker 1: had proposed to a colleague, Joan Clark, but broke it off.
Speaker 1: He told her that he was gay and couldn't marry her.
Speaker 1: But being so frank with the police in this way
Speaker 1: was really dangerous because at the time homosexuality was a
Speaker 1: felony in Great Britain, and so Turing was tried and
Speaker 1: convicted of growth indecency, and he was faced with a
Speaker 1: really terrible choice. Yeah. His two choices were prison or
Speaker 1: hormone injections of estrogen, so chemical sterilization. Yeah, and he
Speaker 1: chose the latter and also lost his security clearance as
Speaker 1: a result, So no government codes, no government computers. And
Speaker 1: on June seven, nineteen fifty four, he was found dead
Speaker 1: by his housekeeper with a partially eaten cyanide laced apple
Speaker 1: by his side. Now, some have theorized that he was
Speaker 1: assassinated as a security risk, but it's pretty much widely
Speaker 1: accepted nowadays that Turing committed suicide, and even then right,
Speaker 1: and it's also accepted that Turing did kill himself in
Speaker 1: in this particular way so that it would allow his
Speaker 1: mother to interpret the situation as an accident, since he'd
Speaker 1: been working with cyanide and other chemicals in his work,
Speaker 1: so she thought that he had some cyanide on his
Speaker 1: hand and he ate an apple and accidentally poisoned himself.
Speaker 1: But assuming he did commit suicide, which is what most
Speaker 1: people have feel, it's a really tragic end to to
Speaker 1: this great life. And and at the heels of this
Speaker 1: terrible prosecution. So in two thousand nine, Prime Minister Gordon
Speaker 1: Brown issued a formal apology for the British Government's treatment
Speaker 1: of Touring, and I'm going to read just part of it.
Speaker 1: He said, Touring truly was one of those individuals we
Speaker 1: can point to whose unique contribution it helped to turn
Speaker 1: the tide of war. The dead of gratitude he has
Speaker 1: owed makes it all the more horrifying. Therefore, that he
Speaker 1: was treated so inhumanely on the behalf of the British
Speaker 1: government and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work,
Speaker 1: I'm very proud to say we're sorry. You deserve so
Speaker 1: much better. So two thousand twelve is Alan Turing Year,
Speaker 1: and a stateside recognition has been long standing. The US
Speaker 1: Association for Computer Machinery has given out the Touring Award
Speaker 1: since nineteen sixty six, and if anything, as technology develops
Speaker 1: in new areas of steady emerge, Alan Turing will probably
Speaker 1: just become more recognized as the year's go on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you think about how many career descriptions that apply
Speaker 1: to his name, you know, father of artificial intelligence, that
Speaker 1: sort of thing that didn't exist when he was alive.
Speaker 1: We can only imagine that more will be added over
Speaker 1: the years as science and technology advances. And we have
Speaker 1: a lot of information about this kind of stuff on
Speaker 1: our site, which we will tell you more about at
Speaker 1: the end. But if you have anything to contribute on
Speaker 1: this topic, you know anything else about Turion's research, or
Speaker 1: maybe an anecdote about his life that we missed, please
Speaker 1: write us at History Podcast at how staff works dot com.
Speaker 1: You can also look us up on Twitter at mist
Speaker 1: in history or on Facebook. And before we wrap up,
Speaker 1: we thought it would be a good time to do
Speaker 1: a little listener mail that has to do also with
Speaker 1: a Battle of the Atlantic. We have a letter here
Speaker 1: from Kate and she says, I just finished listening to
Speaker 1: the sync the Bismarck podcast and wanted to share my
Speaker 1: own tidbit from the story of the German battleship. Following
Speaker 1: the battle, the h MS Cossack recovered floating on a
Speaker 1: board a black and white cat from the Bismarck, renamed
Speaker 1: Oscar and later unsinkable Sam. The cat went on to
Speaker 1: serve on three Royal British Navy ships, surviving two more shipwrecks.
Speaker 1: He was then retired from active duty and lived in
Speaker 1: officers quarters in Gibraltar before being shipped to England, where
Speaker 1: he lived the rest of his days. And she gives
Speaker 1: us a link to a Wikipedia article that has a
Speaker 1: portrait of Sam here. So thanks for that, Kate. That's
Speaker 1: a very interesting tidbit. I looked at the picture. He's
Speaker 1: the super cute cat. We always love pet stories here
Speaker 1: at History that podcast. Yes, we're then us your pet stories,
Speaker 1: especially they're historical because then they can turn into podcasts
Speaker 1: every now and then, So send us your email at
Speaker 1: History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. And again,
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Speaker 1: find them by visiting our website and just going right
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