Accomplishments Of Alan Turing

     The Turing Test has had a rich history since its creation by Alan Turing. But first of all, who was Alan Turing? As Whitby notes Alan Turing was a superb British mathematician. During World War II Turing worked in secrecy for the British military to break the German military codes together with some other scientists using some machines that had some characteristics of the modern computers.(12) After the War, a machine was built in Manchester from which “all modern computers are descended”.(12) In 1948, Alan Turing was writing programs for this machine and was also writing the paper “Computing machinery and intelligence”, published in 1950, from which the concept of the Turing Test was derived later on. (Whitby 13).

In 1661, at the age of 18, Isaac started attending Trinity College in Cambridge. He graduated in 1665 before the

Turing, a physicalist, believed that artificial intelligence could be achieved in the future. Turing argued that the mind was merely due to the physical aspects of the brain and so a machine could one day be created that has a mind of its own, i.e. artificial intelligence. He created a test called the Turing Test to determine whether a machine has artificial intelligence. In the Turing Test, an interrogator asks two subjects a series of questions. One of the subjects is a person, the other is the computer. The goal is for the person to imitate a computer and the computer to imitate the person. If the interrogator is fooled into thinking that the computer is the human then the computer, according to Turing, is concluded to have the ability to think and thus, have a mind. Turing argued that machines passing the Turing Test were sufficient for ascribing thought.

During World War II, the Germans used a type of code that is almost impossible to break. They used this code to communicate between each other and would get directions of where to go and also state where their locations are through that code. What made that code unique was the way that they used it. The way their code worked would be that someone would write a letter in a machine, and then the machine would print a coded version of the message. But that was not the worst part of it. At the end of every day, they would change the key to the messages, all at the same time in a synchronized manner. The way that the Enigma machine was built made it even more complicated to understand. “There are approximately 150,000,000,000,000 - that is, 150 million million - possible combination” (Claire Ellis “Exploring the Enigma”). Alan Turing started working in a

5 remarkable British scientists had gotten their hands on an actual Enigma machine smuggled out of Berlin. They had put tremendous effort into decoding the Nazi's messages by using their cryptanalytic abilities but had failed because of the lack of information on the machine's

This meant that his initial assumption was wrong and that all the other deductions were also wrong. If he continued using this system he would have to try all of this process with all the remaining 25 letters of the board and if these were all wrong, he would have to change the rotor position one place. This system would eventually work but it would take months to decipher the setting for one day and the germans changed their settings everyday. Consequently, all the effort would be useless. From all of this, Alan Turing discovered that you could go through all of this process and determine which of the deductions were wrong with electrical current.

“In March 1952, Turing was charged with indecency for acknowledging a homosexual relationship, which was illegal in Britain at that time.” Turing pleaded guilty and was convicted of a choice of probation on the condition that he underwent one year of hormonal therapy to decrease his libido. Soon after, Turing died at the age of 41, on June 7th, 1954, in Wilmslow, Cheshire, England. “The cause of death was cyanide poisoning, according to the post-mortem examination. A half-eaten apple was found near his body (he had a fascination with the plot of the fairytale Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) and, because it had been suspected that his sudden death was not accidental, the coroner held an inquest which confirmed that he had committed suicide.”

Tim Berners-Lee had a pretty normal childhood. He had three siblings, two parents, and lived in London, England. But inside his little household, were some pretty big brains. Both of his parents were mathematical geniuses, and that really encouraged him to do well in school. And, even at a young age, he was fascinated by electronics and mathematics. Little did he know that later in his life, those skills would really help him.

Sir Isaac Newton graduated from Trinity College. While he was in college, he got his bachelor's degree with no honors or distinction. The year after that, he became a senior taking his master degree in arts. Then in 1669, he became a professor in mathematics. Sir Isaac Newton was an English mathematician, astronomer, theologian and physicist. He is a widely recognized scientist.

The movie, The Imitation Game, follows the story of a remarkable and brilliant English mathematician, named Alan Turing, who helped win World War II, all the while hiding aspects of his life to succeed. In 1939, during World War II, Germany used a machine called Enigma which sent encrypted radio messages with military instructions, it was primarily used to sink English convoy and passenger ships. During this time, Turing is hired by the commander of the Royal Navy with the task of decoding the encrypted messages. This mission is deemed impossible, however with his strong determination, Alan devises a plan to construct a machine to beat the “crooked hand of death”. After two long, hard years, Alan, with the assistance of five other brilliant

On January 4, 1643, Sir Isaac Newton was born in Woolsthrope by Colsterworth, United Kingdom. Newton was an astronomer, along with being an English mathematician and a physicist. Throughout his life, he had many things accomplished as a physicist. In 1687,

“With German invasion imminent in 1939, the Poles opted to share their secrets with the British, and Britain's Government Code and Cipher School (also known as GC&CS) Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, became the centre for Allied efforts to keep up with dramatic war-induced changes in Enigma output.” (Andrew Lycett, BBC.co.uk) If the Allies had access to decoded German communication, then they would have the upper hand. The Germans were so confident in the Enigma code that they used it to encrypt most all of their messages during the war. Since it was a difficult and sensitive task, Bletchley Park needed Britain’s best minds to work together. “He (Alan Turing) was already working part-time for the British Government’s Code and Cypher School before the Second World War broke out. In 1939, Turing took up a full-time role at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire-” (Imperial War Museums). Alan Turing was a very intelligent mathematician and at this point, he was proving this to many others. His genius was exactly what this problem needed. After Britain declared war on Germany, they immediately sent people to work on cracking the Enigma. It was believed to be an impossible task, and yet they put their best efforts into working on it with the help of

Berners-Lee graduated from” The Queen’s college” of Oxford in 1976. He also graduated from the Emanuel school in 1973. He later worked at CERN. He learned a lot about computers there at CERN. CERN stands for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire.

Alan Turing was a famous British mathematician and computer scientist who was determined to prove that machines at some point (possibly sometime in the future) would be able to surpass humans in intelligence levels. In order to prove this true, he created what became to be known as, “The Turing Test.” This test was basically to see if a computer could trick a person into believing that it was human. It would be asked a series of questions, which would be compared to responses of the human. It was designed so that one could judge the intelligence level of the computers’ responses. Turing believed that if a human could not tell the difference between another human and a computer, then it served as proof that a computer is equally intelligent as a human. Due to a large

Morten Tyldum, the director of the film, explains that what caused him taking up on this project was the fact that “[Alan] did all these amazing things, and he’s in the shadows of history. It’s all because he has this shameful ending as a gay man, where he’s ridiculed and his work suffered” (Castillo, Monica). If it were not for Turing, laptops, ipads, and other forms of technology would not have existed without the concept of computer science, and it definitely would not have been as advanced as it is today. On a side note, Alan Turing had cracked the Enigma with the help of another mathematician, Gordan Welchman, but cracked Germany’s naval Enigma single handedly (Hodges, Andrew). In effect, this shortened the war by two years, which in turn saved millions of people’s