Who was Alan Turing?
Alan Turing was an English mathematician and computer scientist who helped break German codes at Bletchley Park during World War II. He is considered one of the fathers of modern computing and artificial intelligence.
Turing was born in London in 1912 and studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge. In 1936, he described a theoretical computing machine, now called the Turing machine.
During the war, he worked at Bletchley Park and played a key role in designing the bombe, a machine used to decode messages encrypted with the Enigma machine.
Computing and AI
After the war, Turing worked on early computers and proposed the Turing test, a way to judge whether a machine can show intelligent behavior equivalent to a human.
In 1952, Turing was prosecuted for homosexual acts, which were illegal in Britain at the time. He accepted chemical castration instead of prison.
He died in 1954 from cyanide poisoning, ruled a suicide. In 2009, the British government apologized for his treatment, and in 2013 he received a royal pardon.
Turing appears on the Bank of England £50 note, issued in 2021. The film The Imitation Game in 2014 told his story.