Intelligence

The truth about Turing

ITBusiness.ca

6/7/2004 5:00:00 PM - The IT industry should be at pains to decipher the life of this cryptographer

by Shane Schick

It must have been hard to build the world's first digital computer, but finding a way to memorialize its inventor is proving to be a project in itself.

Oh, they've tried to help us remember Alan Turing, who committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide on June 7, 1954. The best stab
at it was probably "Breaking the Code," a dramatization of his life which opened in London's West End in 1987. Derek Jacobi starred as Turing, brought to life Hugh Whitemore's play about the mathematician's cryptography work in the Second World War and his persecution as a gay man. At the time, Jacobi told a radio interviewer he was worried the high-level ideas in the script might hurt the show's prospects. "Homosexuality is box office," he said, "but mathematics! -- "

The play, in fact, discussed some of the math in detail but made scant mention of Turing's idea for a "universal machine," which would have conversations with "Turing machines" that turned thoughts into numbers. This was a blueprint for software programs and hardware about 10 years before it was possible to make them.

Fifty years after his death, however, Turing has managed to earn at least some place in the IT industry's hall of fame, though it's a small and grudging one. You're much more likely to hear about the achievements of Gordon Moore or Bill Gates than Turing in the average trade show keynote about the computer's origins. There are occasional mentions in the works of hot young technology authors (like Steven Johnson, who looks briefly at Turing's ideas in his book Emergence) and a wealth of information online, but the only physical landmark I'm aware of is a statue that sits in Manchester's Sackville Park. It is an area known as the epicentre of the city's gay village.

Turing has other strikes against him besides his homosexuality that may help explain his marginal place in the story of information technology. He's British, for one thing -- Americans tend to make sure everyone knows when a local boy makes good. More significantly, perhaps, Turing lacked the professional affiliations that might have given him better public relations in posterity. Andrew Hodges put it well in his 1983 book Alan Turing: The Enigma, when he discusses Turing's 1936-7 paper On computable numbers:

"In this passage Alan Turing opened up what would now be called the cognitive sciences, as well as settling a fundamental question within mathematics. He also founded modern computer science," Hodges wrote. "But all this came from pure scientific thought, and not at all from an economic need for computing. Business and profit-making played no part in it."

If we need reasons to remember and admire Turing, we might think of IBM's self-healing systems, Computer Associates' Nugents artificially intelligent software or anything else that brings us one step closer to a replication of the human brain. Turing theorized this was possible, as long as a random element could be introduced into the calculation process. He also came up with the Turing Test to measure an IT system's intelligence. According to that test, we should be able to get answers from machines that are indistinguishable from those a human could provide us. We're getting closer to passing that test, but without giving more credit to the man who set us on that journey, I think we're failing Turing.

June 18, 2004 at 09:37 PM in Cold War | Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Top of page | Blog Home