Hey Turing, Happy Birthday!

Picture: Young Turing, studying at Sherborne School

Skipping the similar childhood of geniuses, Turing, who was born in a wealthy British family, has always enjoyed a good aristocratic education. He got a good hand at a young age. The following are Turing's "three consecutive academic achievements":

At the age of 24 (1936), he published the paper "On the application of digital computing to solving difficult problems, first proposed the idea in the appendix of the paper: a machine that can assist in mathematical research, which was later called a "Turing machine".

At the age of 25 (1937), he published the article "Computability and Lambda Definability".It is proved that Turing machine computable functions are equivalent to λ-definable functions.It has a foundational significance for the rigorousness of computational theory and the formation and development of computer science.

At the age of 26 (1938), he received his Ph.D. from Princeton University with a thesis titled "A logical system based on ordinal numbers", which had a profound impact on the study of mathematical logic.

After Turing graduated with a Ph.D. from Princeton University,Von NeumannHe once offered Turing an annual salary of $1,500, hoping that he would stay at the school as his assistant professor.

Compared to the UK, this was quite fruitful, but it was a pity that the two great computer experts were unable to work together. If this had been possible at the time, perhaps many great inventions and designs would have come earlier.

After the outbreak of World War II and Britain declared war on Germany, Turing, who had already returned to Britain, immediately enlisted in the army and served in the Government Code and Cypher School, Britain's wartime intelligence center.

The cipher machine developed by Germany at that time could automatically convert plain text into ciphertext (ciphertext) and then transmit it through radio or telephone lines. Even if it was intercepted, the British army could only sigh at a pile of mysterious codes.

Image: German cipher machine during the war Enigma

Turing led more than 200 cryptographers to increase the amount of intelligence deciphered by the Government Code and Cryptography Institute from 39,000 to 84,000 per month.

This intelligence played an important role in major military operations such as the Allied Normandy Landing, and Turing was awarded the "Order of the British Empire" in 1946. At that time, Turing was only 34 years old.

Historians believe that he ended World War II at least two years earlier and saved at least 20 million lives.

In 1950, Turing published a paper titled "Can Machines Think?", which became a landmark work. It was this article that earned Turing the title of "Father of Artificial Intelligence".

In this paper, Turing first proposed the concept of "machine thinking" and put forward a hypothesis:

That is, a person asks a series of questions to the other party without contacting the other party. If he cannot judge whether the other party is a person or a computer based on these questions within a period of time, then it can be considered that the computer has the same intelligence as a person, that is, the computer has intelligent thinking.

This is the famous "Turing Test" that is still used today.

Turing was not just a scientist who buried himself in research all day long, he also had a rich spare time life. Art, poetry and sports were his hobbies.

Among them, Turing's long-distance running level reached the level of professional athletes, and this hobby is also reflected in the movie "The Imitation Game".

His marathon best was recorded at 2:46:03, which was just 11 minutes slower than the best marathon time in the 1948 Olympics.

In the same year, Turing also beat Tom Richards, the Olympic silver medalist, in an international marathon.

In 1952, Turing's former gay partner Murray broke into Turing's house and stole things, so Turing called the police.

After several rounds of police questioning, Turing admitted to his homosexual relationship with Murray and was charged with "gross indecency and sexual perversion". In the conservative era, he violated Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, "gross indecency", which targeted physical contact between men.

Turing's homosexuality was not tolerated by the world, and the government asked Turing to go to prison or be chemically castrated. Turing chose the latter. Chemical castration is the regular injection of female hormones.But Turing suffered greatly from the side effects of the drugs.

In the end, after more than a year of "treatment", Turing, unable to bear the humiliation, decided to end his life.

On June 7, 1954, when Turing was found by a maid, there was half an apple coated with potassium cyanide by the bedside.There are only two weeks left until my 42nd birthday.

In 2009, British computer scientist John Graham-Cumming launched an online petition to vindicate Turing. As of September 10 of the same year, the number of signatures on the petition had exceeded 30,000.

As a result, the then British government and Prime Minister Gordon Brown had to issue a formal apology.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote an article in the Daily Telegraph, formally apologizing to Alan Turing for the British government's prosecution and conviction of Turing on homosexuality-related charges, which led to his suicide.

In 2005, the BBC produced a feature-length documentary about Turing, "Turing: The Life of Alan Turing", in 2009 it filmed the British TV series "Turing: The Life of Alan Turing", and in 2014 it released "The Imitation Game".

Turing's life is constantly reproduced and interpreted on the screen.

In the last few days of his life, Turing wrote several postcards to his friends Robin and Nick. On one of the postcards, Turing wrote a poem imitating the format of a Christian hymn.

Figure: The postcard manuscript