Alan Turing

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Alan Turing Biography

Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS ,was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was influential in the development of computer science and provided an influential formalisation of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine. In 1999 Time Magazine named Turing as one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century for his role in the creation of the modern computer. His Turing test was a significant and characteristically provocative contribution to the debate regarding artificial intelligence. During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, Britain`s codebreaking centre. For a time he was head of Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the method of the bombe, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. After the war he worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he created one of the first designs for a stored-program computer, the ACE.
Towards the end of his life Turing became interested in chemistry. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis, and he predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, which were first observed in the 1960s.
Turing`s homosexuality, which was illegal and considered to be a mental illness during his lifetime, resulted in a criminal prosecution in 1952. He accepted treatment with female hormones as an alternative to going to prison. He died in 1954, several weeks before his 42nd birthday, from an apparently self-administered cyanide poisoning, although his mother (and some others) considered the circumstances of his death to be suspicious. On 10 September 2009, following an Internet campaign, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for the way in which Turing was treated after the war.

Biography Credit: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing
 

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  • Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.
    (quotationspage.com)
    Trivia
  • Alan Turing, the Inventor of Software : BusinessWeek will celebrate its 75 years of existence in 2004. And the magazine decides to celebrate this anniversary with a series of articles about the great thinkers and innovators from these past 75 years. The series stars with a profile of Alan Turing, "Thinking Up Computers." Turing is the man who created the concept of an "universal machine" which would perform various and diverse actions when given various sets of instructions. In other words, he laid out in the 1920s the foundations of software. Here is the introduction of this article. A shy, awkward man born into the British upper middle class in 1912, Turing played a seminal role in the creation of computers. To be sure, many other people contributed, from mathematicians Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace in the 1830s to Herman Hollerith -- whose tabulating company became IBM -- at the turn of the century. But it was Turing who made the critical conceptual breakthrough, almost as an aside in a paper he wrote while in his 20s. Attempting to resolve a long-standing debate over whether any one method could prove or disprove all mathematical statements, Turing invoked the notion of a "universal machine" that could be given instructions to perform a variety of tasks. Turing spoke of a "machine" only abstractly, as a sequence of steps to be executed. But his realization that the data fed into a system also could function as its directions opened the door to the invention of software. "He is the one who found the underlying reason why an automatic calculating device can do so many things," says Martin Davis, professor emeritus of computer science at New York University and a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley. The magazine also gives details about Turing and the Enigma, the machine used to break the coded messages sent by the Germans to field commanders and U-boats during World War II. And here is the conclusion about Turing. Turing didn`t live to see the revolution he unleashed. But he left an enormous legacy. In 1950 he proposed a bold measure for machine intelligence: If a person could hold a typed conversation with "somebody" else, not realizing that a computer was on the other end of the wire, then the machine could be deemed intelligent. Since 1990 an annual contest has sought a computer that can pass this "Turing Test." Nobody has yet taken the $100,000 purse. Turing would no doubt be delighted that engineers the world over are still trying. "Technology Trends" mardi 11 mai 2004
    (radio.weblogs.com/0105910/2004/05/11.html)
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