Turing articles. The eccentricities of a computer genius

TURING, ALAN MATHISON(Turing, Alan Mathison) (1912–1954), English mathematician. Born in London on June 23, 1912. He studied at the Sherborne School, where he showed outstanding abilities in mathematics and chemistry, then at King's College, Cambridge University, graduating in 1934. His immediate teacher, and later colleague, was the mathematician (topologist) M.Kh. A. Newman (1897-1984); Turing took his course on the foundations of mathematics in 1935. In the same year, Turing received a fellowship from King's College to work on his dissertation. In 1936-1938 - at Princeton University in the USA, where his supervisor was the American logician A. Church (1903-1995). After receiving his doctorate, Turing rejected J. von Neumann's offer to stay in the USA and returned to Cambridge, where he received a scholarship from King's College to study logic and number theory, while attending L. Wittgenstein's seminars on the philosophy of mathematics. At the same time, he began a confidential collaboration with the Government Code and Cypher School in Bletchley Park, where he had been involved in the work on deciphering German ciphers even before the war.

After the outbreak of the Second World War, Turing went to work in Bletchley Park. Using earlier Polish developments, together with W. Welchman, he uncovered the ciphers of the German Air Force, creating the Bomba decryption machine, and by the end of 1939 he independently cracked a much more complex cipher used in the Enigma cipher machines that were equipped with German submarines (see . CRYPTOGRAPHY). After the first success, the confrontation with the Enigma continued for several more years, but starting from the spring of 1943, the entire information exchange of the German Navy was easily deciphered by the Allies, by which time they were already using electronic technology. Turing also worked on the development of ciphers for the correspondence between Churchill and Roosevelt, spending the period from November 1942 to March 1943 in the United States. He was awarded the title of Commander of the Order of the British Empire 4th degree.

Pavel Parshin

Alan Mathison Turing(Eng. Alan Mathison Turing; June 23, 1912 - June 7, 1954) - English mathematician, logician, cryptographer, inventor of the Turing machine.

Brief information about Alan Turing:

The article was prepared by Dmitry Maryin and Ildar Nasibullaev.

Name at birth: Alan Mathison Turing
Date of Birth: June 23, 1912
Place of Birth: London, England
Date of death: June 7, 1954
Place of death: Wilmslow, Cheshire, England

Beginnings

Little Alan had a very inquisitive mind. Having learned to read on his own at the age of 6, he asked his teachers for permission to read popular science books. At the age of 11, he made quite competent chemical experiments, trying to extract iodine from algae. All this caused great concern to his mother, who was afraid that her son's hobbies, which were contrary to traditional education, would prevent him from entering the Public School (an English closed private educational institution for boys, study in which was mandatory for children of aristocrats). But her fears were in vain: Alan was able to enter the prestigious Sherbon School (Sherborne Public School). However, soon she had to fear whether her talented son would be able to graduate from this school...

A class magazine eloquently testifies to Alan's school success - young Alan Turing did nothing in the classroom, and in his spare time he studied "out-of-class" sciences. At the age of fifteen, he independently studied the theory of relativity: his diary notes would do honor to a junior student in our time.

The atmosphere and style of teaching in the classical British school, which brought up respectable and trustworthy subjects of the Empire, did not favor the further growth of such interests, which, moreover, Turing had no one to share with. The subjects taught left him completely indifferent, he barely had time, and in the end he faced the real prospect of being denied a school certificate, which once again horrified his mother.

The youthful thirst for knowledge quickly brought Turing and Morcom closer, they became inseparable friends. Now they were already yawning or playing tic-tac-toe together in French lessons, while discussing astronomy and mathematics. After leaving school, they were both going to enter the University of Cambridge, and Alan, who got rid of years of loneliness, may have been almost happy ...

The first attempt to pass the preliminary exams in Cambridge, where they traveled together, was unsuccessful for Alan. But he was not too upset, because he was sincerely happy for Christopher, who successfully passed the tests and received a scholarship. Alan hoped to get in on his second try so he could study with his friend. On February 13, 1930, his friend suddenly died. The sudden death of his best friend shocked the seventeen-year-old Turing, plunging him into a deep and long depression. Nevertheless, he, the former worst student in the class, found the strength to go to Cambridge. He was supported by a firm conviction in his duty to accomplish in science what Christopher could no longer...

Those years were a period of rapid development of quantum physics, and Turing, in his student years, gets acquainted with the latest work in this area. He was greatly impressed by J. von Neumann's book "The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics", in which he finds answers to many questions that have long interested him. Then Turing, probably, did not imagine that in a few years von Neumann would offer him a place at Princeton, one of the most famous universities in the United States. Even later, von Neumann, just like Turing, will be called the "father of computer science" ... But then, in the early 30s, the scientific interests of both future outstanding scientists were far from computers - both Turing and von Neumann are engaged in mostly problems of "pure" mathematics. (Note here Turing's 1935 mathematical paper "The Equivalence of Left and Right Near-Periodicity", in which he simplified one idea of von Neumann in the theory of continuous groups, a fundamental area of modern mathematics.)

Turing came from an aristocratic family, but was never an "esthete": Cambridge political and literary circles were alien to him. He preferred to do his favorite mathematics, and in his spare time - to put chemical experiments, solve chess puzzles. He found rest in intense sports - rowing and running (marathon running will remain his true passion for the rest of his life).

The Cambridge students whispered that Turing never used the exact time signals on the radio, but adjusted the alarm clock by looking at the stars at night and making calculations known only to him (he only listens to children's programs on the radio). Putting chemical experiments, he played a special game "Desert Island", invented by himself. The goal of the game was to obtain various "useful" chemicals from "improvised products" - washing powder, dishwashing detergent, ink and similar "household chemicals"...

Turing brilliantly completes a four-year (undergraduate) course of study. One of his works, devoted to the theory of probability, is awarded a special prize, he is elected to the scientific society of Kings College - fellowship (something between graduate school and the teaching corps). It seemed that he was waiting for a successful career as a slightly eccentric Cambridge don working in the field of "pure" mathematics (don - as teachers are traditionally called in Cambridge and Oxford).

However, Turing never kept within any "frames" ... No one could have foreseen what an exotic problem would suddenly captivate him and what a mathematically unconventional way of solving it he would come up with.

In 1935-1936. Turing creates a theory that will forever inscribe his name in science. The presentation of this theory - the theory of "logical computers" - will later be included in all textbooks on logic, the foundations of mathematics and the theory of computation. "Turing machines" will become an obligatory part of the curriculum for future mathematicians and "computer scientists".

Church-Turing thesis

A fundamental statement for many fields of science, such as computability theory, computer science, theoretical cybernetics, etc. This statement was made by Alonzo Church and Alan Turing in the mid-1930s.

In its most general form, it says that any intuitively computable function is partially computable, or, equivalently, can be computed by some Turing machine.

The Church-Turing physics thesis states: Any function that can be computed by a physical device can be computed by a Turing machine.

The Church-Turing thesis cannot be rigorously proved or disproved because it establishes an "equality" between the strictly formalized notion of a partially computable function and the informal notion of an "intuitively computable function".

Halt problem

This is a decidability problem that can be informally stated as: Given a description of an algorithm and its initial input data, it is required to determine whether the algorithm can ever terminate with this data. The alternative to this is that it runs all the time without stopping.

Alan Turing proved in 1936 that a general algorithm for solving the hanging problem for any possible input could not exist. We can say that the hang problem is undecidable on a Turing machine. Those. it was discovered that computers still can not solve any mathematical problem.

Turing machine

A Turing machine is an abstract executor (abstract computing machine). It was proposed by Alan Turing in 1936 to formalize the concept of an algorithm.

The Turing machine is an extension of the finite automaton and, according to the Church-Turing thesis, is able to imitate all other executors (by setting transition rules) that somehow implement the process of step-by-step calculation, in which each calculation step is quite elementary.

The composition of the Turing Machine includes a tape that is infinite in both directions, divided into cells, and a control device capable of being in one of many states. The number of possible states of the control device is finite and exactly given.

The control device can move left and right along the tape, read and write symbols of some finite alphabet into the tape cells. A special empty symbol is allocated, which fills all the cells of the tape, except for those of them (a finite number) on which the input data is written.

The control device operates according to the transition rules, which represent the algorithm implemented by this Turing Machine. Each transition rule instructs the machine, depending on the current state and the symbol observed in the current cell, to write a new symbol to this cell, go to the new state and move one cell to the left or right. Some states of the Turing Machine can be marked as terminal, and the transition to any of them means the end of the work, the stop of the algorithm.

A Turing machine is said to be deterministic if each combination of state and ribbon symbol in the table corresponds to at most one rule, and non-deterministic otherwise.

A specific Turing machine is specified by enumerating the elements of the set of letters of the alphabet A, the set of states Q, and the set of rules by which the machine operates. They look like: q i a j ->q i1 a j1 d k (if the head is in the state q i , and the letter a j is written in the monitored cell, then the head goes into the state q i1 , a j1 is written to the cell instead of a j , the head makes a movement d k , which has three options: one cell to the left (L), one cell to the right (R), stay in place (H)). For every possible configuration there is exactly one rule. There are no rules only for the final state, in which the machine stops. In addition, you must specify the end and start states, the initial configuration on the tape, and the location of the machine head.

The intuitive understanding of the Turing machine is as follows: there is an infinite tape divided into cells. A carriage rides through the cages. After reading the letter written in the cell, the carriage moves to the right, left or remains in place, while the letter is replaced by a new one. Some letters stop the carriage and complete the job.

Any intuitively computable function is partially recursive, or, equivalently, can be computed by some Turing machine.

Deciphering the Enigma code

In 1939, the British military tasked Turing with the task of unraveling the secret of the Enigma, a special device used to encrypt radio messages in the German navy and in the Luftwaffe. British intelligence obtained this device, but it was not possible to decipher the intercepted radio messages of the Germans.

Turing was given free rein. He worked in Bletchley Park, a British cryptographic center, where he led one of the five groups, Hut 8, engaged in the decryption of Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe messages encoded by the German Enigma cipher machine as part of Project Ultra. Turing's contribution to the cryptographic analysis of the Enigma algorithm was based on an earlier cryptanalysis of previous versions of the cipher machine, performed in 1938 by the Polish cryptanalyst Marian Rejewski.

In early 1940, he developed the Bomba deciphering machine, which made it possible to read Luftwaffe messages. The principle of operation of the "Bomb" was to enumerate options the cipher key and attempts to decrypt the text if part of the plaintext or the structure of the message being decrypted was known. The keys were sorted by rotating mechanical drums, accompanied by a sound similar to the ticking of a clock, which is why the "Bomb" got its name. For each possible key value given by the positions of the rotors (the number of keys was approximately 1019 for the land-based Enigma and 1022 for the cipher machines used in submarines), the Bomba performed a check against the known plaintext, performed electrically. Turing's first Bletchley Bomb was launched on March 18, 1940. The design of Turing's "Bombs" was also based on the design of Rejewski's machine of the same name.

Six months later, the stronger Kriegsmarine cipher was also cracked. Later, by 1943, Turing made a significant contribution to the creation of a more advanced decryption electronic computer "Colossus", used for the same purposes.

The merits of Alan Turing were duly appreciated: after the defeat of Germany, he received an order, was included in the scientific group involved in the creation of the British electronic computer.

Building one of the first computers

Alan Turing participated in the post-war years in the creation of a powerful computer - a machine with programs stored in memory, a number of properties of which he took from his hypothetical universal machine. In 1947, Turing built one of the world's first computers in Manchester. The prototype computer ACE (Automatic Computing Engine - automatic computing device) went into operation in May 1950. Turing was fond of the problems of machine intelligence (he even came up with a test that, in his opinion, allowed him to find out if a machine could think).

In addition to his work at the university, Turing continued to work with the Department of Codes. Only now the ciphers of the Soviet residency in England were already in the center of his attention. In 1951 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Founder of the theory of artificial intelligence

Turing is the founder of the theory of artificial intelligence. The Turing machine is an extension of the finite automaton model and is capable of simulating (given the appropriate program) any machine whose action is to move from one discrete state to another.

Turing test

The Turing test is a test proposed by Alan Turing in 1950 in the article "Computing machinery and intelligence" to test whether a computer is intelligent in the human sense of the word. Turing proposed a test to replace the meaningless, in his opinion, question "can a machine think?" to a more specific one.

The test should be carried out as follows. The judge (human) corresponds in natural language with two interlocutors, one of whom is a human, the other is a computer. If the judge cannot reliably determine who is who, the computer is considered to have passed the test. It is assumed that each of the interlocutors seeks to be recognized as a person. To make the test simple and universal, correspondence is reduced to text messaging. Correspondence must take place at controlled intervals so that the judge cannot draw conclusions from the speed of the responses. (In Turing's time, computers reacted more slowly than humans. Now this rule is necessary because they react much faster than humans.)

Turing predicted that computers would eventually pass his test. He believed that by the year 2000, a computer with a memory of 1 billion bits (about 119 MB) in a 5-minute test could fool the judges 30% of the time. This prediction did not come true. Turing also predicted that the phrase "thinking machine" would not be considered an oxymoron, and that learning computers would play important role in the creation of powerful computers (with which most modern researchers agree).

So far, no program has even come close to passing the test. Every year there is a competition between talking programs and the most humanoid, according to the judges, the Loebner prize is awarded. There is also an additional prize for a program that the judges think will pass the Turing test. This prize has not yet been awarded. The best result was shown by the A.L.I.C.E. having won the Loebner Prize 3 times (in 2000, 2001 and 2004).

Prosecution for homosexuality and Turing's death

Everything collapsed in just one day. In 1952, Turing's apartment was robbed. During the investigation, it turned out that this was done by one of the friends of his sexual partner. The scientist never, in general, did not hide his "non-traditional sexual orientation", but he did not behave defiantly either. However, the theft scandal was widely publicized, and as a result, a "lewd behavior" charge was brought against Turing himself. On March 31, 1953, the trial took place. The sentence involved a choice: either imprisonment or injections of the female hormone estrogen (a method of chemical castration). He chose the latter.

He was fired from the Department of Codes. Denied access to classified materials. True, the team of teachers at the University of Manchester took Turing on bail, but he almost did not appear at the university either. On June 8, 1954, Alan Matheson Turing was found dead in his home. He committed suicide by cyanide poisoning. Turing injected the cyanide solution into the apple. Having bitten it, he died. However, his mother believed that he poisoned himself by accident, as he was always carelessly working with chemicals. There is a version according to which Turing specifically chose this method to give the mother the opportunity not to believe in suicide.

They say that it was this fruit, later found on Alan's night table, that became the emblem of the famous Apple computer company. However, the apple is also a biblical symbol of knowledge and sin.

Memories of Alan Turing

The Turing Award is the most prestigious award in computer science, presented annually by the Association for Computing Machinery for outstanding scientific and technical contributions to this field. The award is sponsored by Intel and Google and is currently accompanied by a $250,000 award. The Turing Prize was first awarded in 1966 to Alan Perlis for the development of compiler technology.

Literature

Alan Turing, On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Series 2, 42 (1936), pp 230-265.
Turing A.M. Computing machines and the mind. Hofstader D., Dennett D. - Samara: Bahrakh-M, 2003. - S. 47-59.
John Hopcroft, Rajeev Motwani, Jeffrey Ullman CHAPTER 8. Introduction to the theory of Turing machines // Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation. - M.: "Williams", 2002. - S. 528. - ISBN 0-201-44124-1
Ivan Dolmachev. Article about Alan Turing.
G.Dalido. Notes on Artificial Intelligence: Turing's Enigma.

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Modern mathematicians, programmers and computer engineers know the name of Alan Turing from their student days: they all had to study the "Turing machine" - the "foundation of the foundations" of the theory of algorithms. Not a single serious textbook on mathematical logic and computability theory can do without a "Turing machine". Almost every great scientific discovery has an amazing story behind it. Behind the "Turing machine" is the life story of a scientific genius - a genius who only many years after his tragic death received worthy recognition.

Ivan Dolmachev

Alan Matheson (Matheson) Turing (June 23, 1912 - June 7, 1954) was an English mathematician, logician, and cryptographer who had a significant impact on the development of computer science. Commander of the Order of the British Empire (1945), Member of the Royal Society of London (1951). The abstract computational “Turing machine” proposed by him in 1936, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer, made it possible to formalize the concept of an algorithm and is still used in many theoretical and practical studies. Alan Turing is generally accepted as the father of computer science and artificial intelligence theory.

Alan Mathison Turing was born June 23, 1912 at Warrington Lodge, London, and was the youngest son of his parents. Turing's parents, Julius Matheson Turing and Ethel Sarah Stoney, met and got married in India. Turing served in the British colonial office, and Ethel Sarah was the daughter of the chief engineer of the Madras Railways. This was a respectable English aristocratic family, belonging to the so-called "upper middle class" and living in accordance with the strict traditions of the Empire.

As a child, Alan and his older brother John rarely saw their parents - their father served in India until 1926; the children remained in England and lived in care in private homes, receiving a strict English upbringing appropriate to their position on the social ladder. In the framework of such education, the study of the foundations of the natural sciences was actually not envisaged.

Alan's school success is eloquently evidenced by the class magazine, in which you can find, for example, the following

I can turn a blind eye to his writings, although I have never seen anything more terrible in my life, I try to endure his unshakable carelessness and obscene diligence; but I still cannot bear the stupefying stupidity of his statements during a perfectly sensible discussion of the New Testament.

Last in class. This is an English teacher's record. In Latin - better: already the penultimate place. In other subjects it is even a little better, but the teachers' verdicts are the same: "hopelessly behind", "ugly progress". School principal writes

This boy is one of those who is destined to be a big problem for any school or community.

However, there are other entries in the classroom journal

If he only wants to be a scientist, he's wasting his time at the Public School... He'll probably be a mathematician. Disciples like him are born once every 200 years.

Young Alan Turing did nothing in the classroom, and in his spare time he studied "out-of-class" sciences.

Nevertheless, in the areas that interested him, Turing showed extraordinary abilities. He solved difficult mathematical problems in 1927, despite the fact that he was not taught even the basics of mathematical analysis. In 1928, at the age of 16, Turing read Einstein's work, which he managed to understand to such an extent that he was able to extrapolate from the text Einstein's doubts about the validity of Newton's Laws, which were not explicitly stated in the article.

The atmosphere and style of teaching in the classical British school, which brought up respectable and trustworthy subjects of the Empire, did not favor the further growth of such interests, which, moreover, Turing had no one to share with. The subjects taught left him completely indifferent, he barely had time and, in the end, faced the real prospect of refusing to issue a school certificate, which once again horrified his mother.

Alan truly loved his friend. After leaving school, they were both going to go to Cambridge University, and Alan, having got rid of years of loneliness, may have been almost happy.

The first attempt to pass the preliminary exams in Cambridge, where they traveled together, was unsuccessful for Alan. But he was not too upset, because he was sincerely happy for Christopher, who successfully passed the tests and received a scholarship. Alan hoped to get in on his second try so he could study with his friend. On February 13, 1930, Chris suddenly died. The sudden death of his best friend shocked the seventeen-year-old Turing, plunging him into a deep and long depression. Nevertheless, he, the former worst student in the class, found the strength to go to Cambridge. He was supported by a firm conviction in his duty to do in science what Christopher could no longer.

In 1931, Turing became a student at King's College, Cambridge, the world famous old English university. Turing did not score on the exam and therefore after school he entered King's College Cambridge, although he intended to go to Trinity College. Turing studied at King's College until 1934 under the guidance of the famous mathematician Godfrey Harold Hardy.

The University of Cambridge, which enjoyed special privileges granted by the English monarchs, has long been famous for its liberal traditions, and the spirit of free thought has always reigned within its walls. Here Turing finds - perhaps for the first time - his real home, where he could completely devote himself to science.

The main place in his life was occupied by the enthusiastic study of the sciences that interested him so much - mathematics and quantum physics. Those years were a period of rapid development of quantum physics, and Turing, in his student years, gets acquainted with the latest work in this area. John von Neumann's book "The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics" makes a great impression on him, in which he finds answers to many questions that have long interested him. Then Turing, probably, did not imagine that in a few years von Neumann would offer him a place at Princeton, one of the most famous universities in the United States. Even later, von Neumann, like Turing, will be called the "father of computer science." But then, in the early 30s of the twentieth century, the scientific interests of both future outstanding scientists were far from computers - both Turing and von Neumann were mainly engaged in problems of "pure" mathematics.

Turing came from an aristocratic family, but was never an "esthete": Cambridge political and literary circles were alien to him. He preferred to do his favorite mathematics, and in his spare time to put on chemical experiments, solve chess puzzles, play go (this oriental game was still a curiosity then). He found rest in intense sports - rowing and running. Marathon running will remain his true passion for the rest of his life.

He didn't have many friends. Arrogant student aristocrats were repelled by his somewhat erratic clothing style, eccentric hairstyles and manner of speaking in a harsh, raspy voice, besides, he sometimes stuttered badly - Turing, as usual, did not fit into the "placed" framework of social norms of behavior.

The Cambridge students whispered that Turing never used the exact time signals on the radio, but adjusted the alarm clock by looking at the stars at night and making calculations known only to him alone, while on the radio he listened exclusively to children's programs. Putting chemical experiments, he played a special game "Desert Island", invented by himself. The goal of the game was to get various "useful" chemicals from the "improvised products" - washing powder, dishwashing detergent, ink and similar "household chemicals".

Turing brilliantly completes a four-year course of study. One of his papers, devoted to the theory of probability, is awarded a special prize, and he is elected to the scientific society of King's College. In 1935, Turing published Equivalence of Left and Right Near-Periodicity, in which he simplified one idea of von Neumann in the theory of continuous groups, a fundamental area of modern mathematics. It seemed that he was waiting for a successful career as a slightly eccentric Cambridge teacher working in the field of "pure" mathematics.

However, Turing was never kept within any "frames". No one could have foreseen what an exotic problem would suddenly captivate him, and what a mathematically extraordinary way of solving it he would be able to come up with.

In 1935-1936, Turing creates a theory that will forever inscribe his name in science. The presentation of this theory - the theory of "logical computers" - will later be included in all textbooks on logic, the foundations of mathematics and the theory of computation. "Turing machines" will become an obligatory part of the curriculum for future mathematicians and "computer scientists".

In 1928, the German mathematician David Hilbert drew the world's attention to the problem of resolution. In mathematics, a decision problem (Entscheidungsproblem) is a problem: to find an algorithm that would take as input a description of any solvability problem (a formal language and a mathematical statement S in this language), and after a finite number of steps would stop and give one of two answers: "True" or "False", depending on whether the statement S is true or false. The algorithm is not required to give any justification for its answer, but the answer must always be true.

Turing reformulated Gödel's incompleteness theorem, replacing Gödel's universal formal arithmetic language with the simple hypothetical devices that would become known as Turing machines. He proved that such a machine would be capable of performing any mathematical computation representable as an algorithm, Turing further showed that there is no solution to the Entscheidungsproblem, first proving that the Stopping Problem for a Turing machine is undecidable: in general, it is impossible to algorithmically determine whether the Entscheidungsproblem will stop when any given Turing machine.

The idea of a "Universal Machine" capable of performing the functions of any other machine, or in other words, to calculate everything that can be calculated in principle, was extremely original. Von Neumann acknowledged that the concept of the modern computer was based on this work by Alan Turing. Turing machines are still the main object of study in the theory of algorithms.

From September 1936 to July 1938 Turing worked at Princeton. In addition to doing mathematics, the scientist studied cryptography, and also designed an electro-mechanical binary multiplier. In June 1938, Turing completed his Ph.D.

During the Second World War, Alan Turing took an active part in breaking German ciphers in Bletchley Park . Historian and Bletchley Park veteran Asa Briggs once said:

Bletchley Park needed exceptional talent, exceptional genius, and Turing's genius was just that.

Using earlier Polish developments, together with W. Welchman, he uncovered the ciphers of the German Air Force, creating the Bomba decryption machine, and by the end of 1939 he independently cracked a much more complex cipher used in the Enigma cipher machines that were equipped with German submarines. After the first success, the confrontation with the Enigma continued for several more years, but starting in the spring of 1943, the entire information exchange of the German Navy was easily deciphered by the Allies, who had already used electronic technology by this time. Turing also worked on the development of ciphers for the correspondence between Churchill and Roosevelt, spending the period from November 1942 to March 1943 in the United States.

In 1945, Turing was awarded an MBE by King George VI for his military service, but this fact remained a secret for many years.

After von Neumann in the United States proposed a plan to create an EDVAC computer, similar work was launched in the UK at the National Physical Laboratory, where Turing worked from 1945 to 1948. The scientist proposed a very ambitious project ACE (Automatic Computing Engine - Automatic Computer), which, however, was never implemented.

Turing spent the 1947-1948 academic year in Cambridge, and in May 1948 he received an offer to take the post of teacher and deputy director of the computing laboratory at the University of Manchester, which by that time had taken a leading position in the development of computer technology in the UK.

In 1948, Alan, together with his former colleague, began to write a chess program for a computer that did not yet exist.

In the same year, Turing invented the LU decomposition method, which is used to solve systems of linear equations, invert matrices, and calculate the determinant.

In 1951, Turing was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.

In the postwar years, Turing continued to collaborate with the School of Ciphers and Codes, and the laboratory in Manchester became involved in the work of the British nuclear project. In the context of the Cold War, this led to increased scrutiny of the privacy of those who were allowed access to state secrets.

On March 31, 1952, Turing was arrested on charges of homosexuality, which he never hid (although he made an unsuccessful attempt to marry at one time). Faced with a choice between imprisonment and hormonal treatment, he chose the latter. This "treatment" lasted one year, which led to impotence and gynecomastia.

The accusations against Turing led to the loss of the reliability status. At the time, there were some concerns about the recruitment of homosexual spies by foreign intelligence agencies. Alan Turing was never charged with espionage, but he was denied access to classified information and fired from Bletchley Park. In 1953, the scientist had problems with the security service related to his foreign contacts and a trip to Greece, and was also harassed in the local press. All this led to a severe crisis.

Despite outstanding services to the British crown, after the war he spent several years in a psychological clinic. After leaving there, he became fascinated with what he called "the desert island game." Using the means at hand, he obtained more and more rare chemicals. After a year of such a strange game, he received potassium cyanide in his kitchen.

On June 8, 1954, Alan Turing was found dead in his apartment. An autopsy revealed that the cause of death was cyanide poisoning. A bitten apple was found on the bedside table, and although it has never been examined for cyanide, it is widely believed that it contained the poison. The investigation determined that the scientist had committed suicide. The body was cremated on June 12, 1954.

Whether the death of the scientist was intentional or was the result of an accident as a result of careless handling of poison is still not exactly known.

In a relatively short life, Turing produced scientific results whose significance goes far beyond pure mathematics. With his work, Turing, along with Godel, buried the hopes of some mathematicians who believed that mathematics, as the most formalized part of human knowledge, can be represented as a set of axioms and theorems.

Developed in 1947 by Turing, "Abbreviated Code Instructions" marked the beginning of the creation, research and practical use of programming languages.

Turing is considered the founder of not only computing, but also artificial intelligence. An exceptional role in the development of this research direction was played by a small article "Computing Machines and the Mind", published in the journal "Mind" in 1950, in which Turing proposed the now famous thought experiment (Turing test). In its original formulation, the “Turing test” assumes a situation in which two people, a man and a woman, communicate through some channel that excludes the perception of voice, with a third person separated from them by a wall, who tries to determine the gender of each of his interlocutors by indirect questions; while the man tries to confuse the questioner, and the woman helps the questioner find out the truth. The question then is whether a machine can be as successful in this "imitation game" instead of a man (whether the questioner will be wrong in his conclusions as often). Subsequently, a simplified form of the test became widespread, in which it is found out whether a person, communicating in a similar situation with a certain interlocutor, can determine whether he is communicating with another person or with an artificial device.

This thought experiment had a number of fundamental consequences. First, he proposed some operational criterion for answering the question "Can a machine think?". Secondly, this criterion turned out to be linguistic: the specified question was explicitly replaced by the question of whether a machine can adequately communicate with a person in natural language. Turing wrote directly about the change of wording, and at the same time expressed his confidence that "the method of question and answer is suitable for covering almost any field of human activity that we want to bring into consideration." The consequence of this was the most important role that in the further development of artificial intelligence, at least until the 1980s, was played by research on modeling the understanding and production of natural language. In 1977, P. Winston, then director of the artificial intelligence laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote that teaching a computer to understand natural language is the same as achieving the construction of intelligence in general.

In 2002, Alan Turing was voted "one of the 100 greatest Britons in history" by BBC viewers, ranking 21st.

It wasn't until September 10, 2009 that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown publicly apologized for the persecution Alan Turing was subjected to:

Alan and many thousands of other gay men convicted under homophobic laws were treated horribly. And many millions of those who were not condemned lived for years in constant fear of being condemned for being who they are ...

Recognizing Alan as one of the UK's most notorious victims of homophobia is another step towards equality...

On behalf of the British government and all those who are living at liberty thanks to Alan's contribution, I say in all sincerity: forgive us, you deserve much better.

Although homosexuality was decriminalized in 1967, it wasn't until December 2013 that Queen Elizabeth II granted a posthumous pardon to Alan Turing.

We consider Turing's verdict unfair and discriminatory, the pardon is a worthy tribute to the memory of this great man,

This is how the Minister of Justice of Great Britain Chris Grayling reacted to the Queen's decision.

In memory of Alan Turing:

one of the asteroids is named after the scientist
The Association for Computing Machinery's annual award is called the Turing Award
on the main square of the University of Surrey (England) there is a statue of Turing and one of the buildings of the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences is named after him
one of the classrooms of the computer science department at the University of Lille in northern France is named after Alan M. Turing
The University of Manchester, The Open University, Oxford Brookes University and Aarhus University (Denmark) have buildings named after Turing and others.
in 2001, a monument to the scientist was erected in Manchester

Monument to Alan Turing in Whitworth Gardens, Manchester, UK. The monument was unveiled on Turing's birthday, June 23, 2001. Depicts the figure of Turing with an apple in his hand, quietly sitting on a city bench in the park. Funds for the construction of the monument were collected within 12 months through donations and lotteries. The plaque at the feet of the statue reads:

Alan Mathison Turing
1912 - 1954
Father of computer science
mathematician, logician,
military cipher cracker,
victim of prejudice.

——————
"Mathematics, rightly understood, possesses not only truth,
but also the highest beauty, the beauty of cold and severe, like
beauty of sculpture." - Bertrand Russell

Turing is named after the following objects of natural science:

Turing machine
Turing reducibility
Turing algorithm
Turing's thesis
Turing switch
Turing test
Turing reduction
Turing degree
Church-Turing theorem.

Alan Mathison Turing is a world-famous genius scientist, codebreaker, computer science pioneer, a man with an amazing destiny, who had a significant impact on the development of computer technology.

Alan Turing: a short biography

Alan Mathison Turing was born in London on June 23, 1912. His father, Julius Turing, was a colonial civil servant in India. There he met and married Alan's mother, Ethel Sarah. Parents permanently lived in India, and children (Alan and John, his older brother) studied in private homes in England, where they received a strict upbringing.

The eccentricities of a computer genius

Contemporaries described Turing as a slightly eccentric person, not very charming, rather acrimonious and endlessly hardworking.

Being allergic, Turing Alan preferred a gas mask to antihistamines. In it, he went to offices during the flowering period of plants. Perhaps this strangeness was due to the reluctance to fall under the influence of the side effects of the drug, namely, drowsiness.
The mathematician had another feature in relation to his bicycle, in which the chain flew off at certain intervals. Turing Alan, not wanting to fix it, counted the revolutions of the pedals, at the right time got off the bike and adjusted the chain with his hands.
In Bletchley Park, a talented scientist fastened his own mug to the battery with a chain so that it would not be stolen.
Living in Cambridge, Alan never set the clock in accordance with the exact time signals, he calculated it mentally, fixing the location of a certain star.
One day, Alan, having learned about the depreciation of the English foot, melted down the coins he had and buried the resulting silver ingot somewhere in the park, after which he completely forgot the place of the hiding place.
Turing was a good sportsman. Feeling the need to exercise, he ran a long distance, determining for himself that he excelled in this sport. Then, in record time, he won the 3- and 10-mile distances of his club, and in 1947 he took fifth place in the marathon race.

The eccentricities of Alan Turing, whose merits for Britain are simply invaluable, few people were perplexed. Many colleagues recall the excitement and enthusiasm with which the genius of computer science took on any idea that interested him. Turing was looked upon with great respect, as he stood out for his originality of thought and his own intellect. A talented mathematician, having all the makings of a qualified teacher, was able to solve and explain any, even the most unusual, problem in an accessible way.

Alan Turing: contributions to computer science

In 1945, Alan refused to work as a lecturer at the University of Cambridge and, on the recommendation of M. Newman, moved to the National Physical Laboratory, where at that time a group was being formed to design and create an ACE - a computer. During the 3 years (from 1945 to 1948) - the period of the group's existence - Turing made the first sketches and made several important proposals for its construction.

The scientist submitted a report on ACE to the executive committee of the NFL on March 19, 1946. The accompanying note attached to it stated that the work was based on the EDVAG project. However, the project contained a large number of valuable ideas that belonged directly to the English mathematician.

The software for the first computer was also written by Alan Turing. Informatics without the painstaking work of this talented scientist, perhaps, would not have reached such a level as it is today. At the same time, the first chess program was written.

In September 1948, Alan Turing, whose biography has been associated with mathematics all his life, transferred to work in Nominally, he took the position of deputy director of the laboratory of computers, but in reality he was in the mathematical department of M. Newman and was responsible for programming.

Evil joke of fate

The English mathematician, who continued to collaborate with intelligence after the war, was brought on a new task: deciphering Soviet codes. At this point, fate played a cruel joke on Turing. One day his house was robbed. The note left by the thief warned against the extreme undesirability of contacting the police, but the indignant Alan Turing immediately called the station. During the investigation, it turned out that the robber was one of the friends of Alan's lover. In the process of testifying, Turing had to confess to his unconventional orientation, which in those years in England was a criminal offense.

The high-profile trial of the famous scientist continued for quite a long time. He was offered either a two-year prison term or hormone therapy to get rid of sexual desire.

Alan Turing (photo of recent years above) chose the latter. As a result of treatment with the most powerful drugs, which lasted for a year, Turing developed impotence, as well as gynecomastia (breast enlargement). Criminally prosecuted Alan was suspended from secret work. In addition, the British feared that homosexuals could be recruited by Soviet spies. The scientist was not accused of espionage, but was forbidden to discuss his work in Bletchley Park.

Alan Turing's apple

The story of Alan Turing is sad to the core: the mathematical genius was fired from his service and banned from teaching. His reputation was completely ruined. At 41, the young man was thrown overboard from the usual rhythm of life, left without his favorite job, with a broken psyche and ruined health. In 1954, Alan Turing, whose biography still excites the minds of many people, was found dead in his own house, and a bitten apple lay on the bedside table near the bed. As it turned out later, it was stuffed with cyanide. So Alan Turing recreated a scene from his favorite fairy tale "Snow White" in 1937. According to some reports, that is why the fruit became the emblem of the world-famous computer company Apple. In addition, the apple is also a biblical symbol of the knowledge of sin.

The official version of the death of a talented mathematician is suicide. Alan's mother believed that the poisoning happened by accident, because Alan always worked carelessly with chemicals. There is a version that Turing deliberately chose this way of leaving life in order to enable his mother not to believe in suicide.

Rehabilitation of an English mathematician

The great mathematician was rehabilitated posthumously. In 2009, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown publicly apologized for the crackdown on the computer genius. In 2013, Turing was officially pardoned for obscenity charges by Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain.

Alan Turing's work consisted not only in the development of information technology: at the end of his life, the scientist devoted himself to biology, namely, he began to develop a chemical theory of morphogenesis, which gave full scope for combining the abilities of an exact mathematician and a gifted philosopher full of original ideas. The first outlines of this theory are described in a preliminary report in 1952 and a report that appeared after the scientist's death.

The most prestigious award in computer science is the Turing Award. It is presented annually by the Association for Computing Machinery. The award, currently $250,000, is sponsored by Google and Intel. The first such important award in 1966 was awarded to Alan Perlis for the creation of compilers.

British scientist Alan Turing spent most of his life in India, where his father worked. From the very beginning of his biography, he was very different from his peers - he learned to read early, his favorite books were popular science publications, at the age of eleven his hobby was chemical experiments, and at fifteen he independently figured out the theory of relativity.

Alan was bored in a privileged school, where his parents sent him, and he devoted all his free time to the study of mathematics, physics and chemistry.

At nineteen, Turing became a student at King's College, Cambridge University. When it came time to expect a promising young man to have a girlfriend, and then the wife of Alan Turing, he realized that he was not at all attracted to the female sex, but was not very upset about this.

To his mother, who hoped one day to see her son's bride, he wrote that there were many pretty young ladies in his circle, with whom he was happy to communicate.

Mathematics continued to be his main passion, and one of his scientific works, performed during his studies at college and devoted to the theory of probability, received a special award, and Alan Turing himself became a member of the college's scientific society.

After graduating from the university, the young scientist began to develop the theory of the "Turing Machine", thanks to which he entered the history of science forever, and Alan's personal life again faded into the background. In 1938, when Britain was preparing for war with Nazi Germany, Turing was periodically involved in deciphering secret information about the movements of German troops at the school of codes and ciphers in Bletchley Park, and when England officially entered the war, he devoted himself entirely to this activity.

Soon he became head of the department that deciphered all the codes of the German navy. And yet, nature took its toll - while working in Bletchley Park, he fell in love with a student at the Faculty of Mathematics at Cambridge, Joan Clark, who came to work in the Turing department. Despite the fact that Alan did not hide the truth about his homosexual inclinations from Joan, this did not prevent their close communication - the girl was fascinated by such a young man who had already achieved so much in science, who had a great sense of humor and a sharp mind.

Alan organized work shifts so that they could be at work at the same time, they went for walks together, found a lot of topics for discussion - they were very good together, so much so that the scientist proposed to the girl, and Joan Clark should soon was to marry Alan Turing. He bought her a ring, then they went to Alan's family, who received the betrothed very warmly.

In conversations with the bride, Alan even said that he would like them to have children, but this could only happen after the end of the war. The relationship between them was very warm, Alan and Joan were good together, they had many common interests and hobbies. However, the plan was never destined to happen - after a few months, Turing realized that he himself would not be happy with Joan, and would not make her happy.

The breakup was difficult for both, but Alan did his best to make Joan realize that she was not rejected as a person, so they remained friendly until the end of Turing's life.

A few years later, Alan made an attempt to renew his former relationship with Clarke, but she was against it.

Turing had affairs with men, and one of them ended in failure for the outstanding scientist. Alan met a young worker who then robbed him. Turing, offended by the guy, wrote a statement to the police, and the detained robber publicly spoke about Alan's homosexual inclinations, a trial took place, and only thanks to his great services to Britain, Turing was not sent to prison, but was prescribed compulsory treatment, which, in the end, led not only to change his body, but also to the destruction of the intellect.

When the treatment was canceled, it was already too late - the drugs did their job, which the scientist could not bear. It all ended with Turing committing suicide.

Portal for the student. Self-training