Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house
Speaker 1: stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm fair Dowdy and I'm Deblina chuk Reboarding, and today
Speaker 1: we're going to be talking about Alan Turing. And he's
Speaker 1: considered the father of computer science, the father of artificial intelligence,
Speaker 1: and also one of the most important wartime code breakers
Speaker 1: in World War Two. So quite a resume just right
Speaker 1: off the bat there, and for listeners with a more
Speaker 1: literary bent, he's also been called the Shelley of Science,
Speaker 1: which is a name I kind of took a shine
Speaker 1: to you. Yeah, and others have too. He's been a
Speaker 1: really popular podcast suggestion, though his resumes focus on math
Speaker 1: and technology has always kind of scared us off a
Speaker 1: little bit. I think, I mean things like number theory, probability,
Speaker 1: computer programs. It's not our usual subject matter stuff. I'm
Speaker 1: 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 article has in just
Speaker 1: about every science journal you can name, and there's a
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works podcast to Yeah, Jonathan and Chris talked
Speaker 1: about Turing's life less fall on tech stuff and so
Speaker 1: that's a great place to turn if you want to
Speaker 1: a little more of an in depth discussion on programming. Yeah, specifically,
Speaker 1: I was glad though that even they admitted that the
Speaker 1: map 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, not until his dad retired. So
Speaker 1: he spent prep school trying to do as much science
Speaker 1: and math as he could get away with, which at
Speaker 1: the time it wasn't really the agenda. I guess he
Speaker 1: would be an outstanding student these days, but his skepticism
Speaker 1: and his curiosity also sometimes got him in trouble with
Speaker 1: with the authority figures at school. But in nineteen twenty eight,
Speaker 1: he had his first experience of true intellectual stimulation. He
Speaker 1: made friends with a boy who was one year ahead
Speaker 1: of him, Christopher Morecambe and Jonathan and Chris. The way
Speaker 1: they explained this, I really liked it the way they
Speaker 1: explained the friendship. Essentially, the two kids could bounce ideas
Speaker 1: off of each other and combine what they knew and
Speaker 1: really come away from it with a deeper understanding. So
Speaker 1: sort of a friendship of two minds that was really
Speaker 1: influential in the young Turing's life. Yeah, So when Marcum
Speaker 1: died suddenly in nineteen third, the teenage Churing was left
Speaker 1: wondering what happened to Markham's consciousness. He was pretty devastated
Speaker 1: and and wanted to explore that idea further. So for
Speaker 1: three years he wrote letters to Markham's mother trying to
Speaker 1: figure out the relationship between mind and matter. And that's
Speaker 1: a quest that would later define his work and artificial intelligence,
Speaker 1: which you're going to talk about a little more in
Speaker 1: a few minutes. Yea, I will definitely be talking about that.
Speaker 1: But in October nine, so while he's really in the
Speaker 1: middle of his grief in and this new look into
Speaker 1: the relationship between mind and matter. He goes off to
Speaker 1: college King's College, Cambridge, and of course he studies math,
Speaker 1: and it was really a different inspiring environment for him
Speaker 1: to one where he could think creatively. He could study
Speaker 1: things like philosophy and economics and surround himself by intelligent people,
Speaker 1: and also recognized his own sexuality, and he socialized with
Speaker 1: some of the anti war intellectual circle. But his politics
Speaker 1: weren't really sharply defined during this period. His in recreation
Speaker 1: was athletic. He liked running and rowing and failing, and
Speaker 1: of course doing math. Yeah, by nineteen thirty four he
Speaker 1: had received a distinguished degree, and by nineteen thirty five,
Speaker 1: at age twenty two, he got a fellowship to King's College.
Speaker 1: So well on this intellectual path of his. But it
Speaker 1: was in nineteen thirty five that Turing started tackling and
Speaker 1: intriguing mathematical question, and that's the question of decidability. And
Speaker 1: during that process he envisions a machine that could complete
Speaker 1: computational operations just like the human brain. The Turing machine
Speaker 1: at that point was purely theoretical, but it could perform
Speaker 1: any kind of operation. It was programmed to do, play chess,
Speaker 1: to calculate numbers, anything, like that, and that idea develops
Speaker 1: into the idea of a universal Turing machine which could
Speaker 1: handle any task, and individual touring machine could. So, for example,
Speaker 1: if the Turing machine is the early computer program, the
Speaker 1: universal machine would be the early computer, the one machine
Speaker 1: that can do any task it's 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 continued 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: Fleshley Park in London. Yeah, and the GCCS was busy
Speaker 1: bringing together all of the country's top minds at this point,
Speaker 1: so mathematicians like Touring, that also chess players and egyptologists,
Speaker 1: all sorts of smart people with different kinds of skills,
Speaker 1: anyone who they hoped might lend insight into breaking German codes,
Speaker 1: which was what they were all about in the chief
Speaker 1: Code at the time. The one that was really giving
Speaker 1: them the most trouble was the Enigma, and Polish Cryptanalysis
Speaker 1: had been working on the Enigma for a really long
Speaker 1: time since the nineteen thirty two and they had created
Speaker 1: a code breaking machine called the Bomba a few years
Speaker 1: after that, but by nineteen thirty nine, Touring and others
Speaker 1: were helping to create a new machine, one that could
Speaker 1: adapt to the Enigma, because it got to where the
Speaker 1: Germans were changing the codes every twenty four hours pretty much,
Speaker 1: so he helped develop a new machine called the Bomb,
Speaker 1: which could decipher LOOFWAFA Enigma communications. There's a really neat
Speaker 1: British Heritage article by Gene pash Key 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 upbeat. 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 had 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 and that type of thing, but also some really
Speaker 1: serious communications in there. It rose to an eventual eighty
Speaker 1: four thousand transmissions a month, so pretty astonishing figure. And
Speaker 1: with the nineteen forty three breaking of Germany's high level
Speaker 1: binary teleprinter code, which was what Hitler himself used, and
Speaker 1: high members of his government um Churchill, was able to
Speaker 1: read Hitler's mail before Hitler could read it. According to
Speaker 1: Posh's article, something I thought was interesting and something I
Speaker 1: never knew about Bletchley Park. Yeah, me neither. But it
Speaker 1: turns out the combined efforts of Bletchley Park shortened the
Speaker 1: war by two years, and for his part, Turing received
Speaker 1: the Order of the British Empire, which was one of
Speaker 1: the most prestigious awards you could get. Yeah. And so
Speaker 1: after the war he's looking for a new job and
Speaker 1: he was recruited to the National Physics Laboratory, and the task,
Speaker 1: conveniently enough was to design and build an electronic computer,
Speaker 1: so essentially a real Turing machine. Seems like just the
Speaker 1: guy to bring in to do this, and he called
Speaker 1: his new design the Automatic Computing Engine, which has the
Speaker 1: lovely acronym ACE. Would have 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 Mac. 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 nine Olympic
Speaker 1: marathon team. So he was pretty good at it. He
Speaker 1: was 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
Speaker 1: director even though there was no director of the program.
Speaker 1: Kind of a strange little detail there. Yeah, but he
Speaker 1: designed the programming system of the Ferronti Mark one, the
Speaker 1: first commercially available digital electronic computer, so hopefully that was
Speaker 1: a little solace for a consolation program. Yeah. Um. And
Speaker 1: it was also during his time at Manchester that Turing
Speaker 1: started to hypothesize about what would later be known as
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence, and and I thought it was it was interesting,
Speaker 1: and this is something that's kind of, I guess, difficult
Speaker 1: for me to talk about with my limited knowledge of
Speaker 1: computer programming and science. I just work on a computer.
Speaker 1: I don't know what happens inside. But I 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 Fronti 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 doggie 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 Letchley 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: hands 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 feeling, 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 debt 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 state side recognition has been long standing. The
Speaker 1: US Association for Computer Machinery has given out the Touring
Speaker 1: Awards since nineteen sixty six, and if anything, as technology
Speaker 1: develops in new areas of steady emerge, Alan Turing will
Speaker 1: probably just become more recognized as the years 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. Yeah, and we
Speaker 1: have a lot of information about this kind of stuff
Speaker 1: on our site, which we will tell you more about
Speaker 1: at the end. But if you have anything to contribute
Speaker 1: on this topic, you know anything else about Touring's research,
Speaker 1: or maybe an anecdote about his life that we missed,
Speaker 1: please write us at history podcast at how staff works
Speaker 1: dot com. You can also look us up on Twitter
Speaker 1: at missed in History or on Facebook. Again. We also
Speaker 1: do have so many tech articles. You can find them
Speaker 1: by visiting our website and just going right to the
Speaker 1: tech cab and looking from there you'll find tons of
Speaker 1: stuff that interests you if you are into computer science
Speaker 1: or programming or math or anything like that. All of
Speaker 1: it is on our website at www dot ho stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com. Mm hmmmm. For more on this and
Speaker 1: thousands of other topics, does it how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: H m hm, m m mmmm.