ALAN TURING 100 YEARS: Person who gave life to machines

2012/06/01 Etxebeste Aduriz, Egoitz - Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Matematika
• Biografiak
• Teknologia

Boys practice grass hockey. Most of them spin around the ball, hitting and hitting the sticks of fire, playing. Alan is a few meters apart. He also has the cane in his hand, but is standing, almost forgotten about the game; crouching, he looks at some field jewelers as if he wanted to see how they grow.

That moment was picked up in a drawing in 1923 by Alan Turing's mother. At the age of 11, Turing was an image that showed a new way of looking at the world. He was lonely, had no friends, did not want to play with the children of his age. He preferred his explorations and experiments; for example, he made mixtures at home in the laboratory. He also liked the numbers, from very small, as his mother said: just learn the numbers, in all the street lamps he stopped to look at his serial number.

Complaints were common in school teacher reports. In Latin and English it was very bad. He wrote very slowly and, according to the English teacher, his lyrics were "the worst I've ever seen." It developed better in science, but they complained that it was neither orderly nor methodical, and that it preferred to use its own ways to solve problems than the methods taught in school. The school was boring for Turing.

At sixteen he meets Christopher Morcom. It was an older year and Turing was so interested in scientific issues. For the first time I had with whom to talk about Einstein's relativity, or to whom he showed the decimals of the n... He opened the world to him and did everything he could to be with Morcom. He was fascinated: "Next to him, any other seems totally normal," Turing wrote. But two years after meeting her, TB suddenly took Morcom. It was a hard blow to Turing.

He managed to enter King's College Cambridge after two attempts. He successfully graduated in 1934 and the following year won an award for a work done on probability theory. But in 1936, at the age of 24, he demonstrated his genius. He created the concept known as "turing machine" (on which today's computers are based) and essentially laid the foundation for computing.

After two years of doctorate at Princeton University (USA), he returned to England. I thought about creating a computer, but as soon as they arrived they called him from Bletchley Park, from the Government Code and the School of Encryption, to help them decipher the codes that the Germans created with the Enigma machine. When the war broke out in 1939, Bletchey began working in Park. Among other things, he developed a machine called 'Bombe', which from 1940 was able to decipher the German Enigma codes.

In Bletchley Park he soon received the fame of eccentric genius. His colleague Jack Good said that "every year, the first week of June, he was attacked by pollen allergy and we saw him coming by bicycle with gas mask. He told his bicycle the chain several times, but instead of fixing it, he counted how many pedal strokes he could give, and before he pulled the chain down from the bike and adjusted by hand (...) tied the cup to the radiator with chains and padlocks so that no one would steal it."

Turing liked in Bletchley Park. His companions admired him. The young mathematician Joan Clark also fell in love and Turing proposed to marry him, but in the end he confessed that he was homosexual and although Joan was the same, Turing retreated.

At the end of his work at Bletchley Park, he joined the National Physics Laboratory and designed the Automatic Computing Machine. No one valued it. Turing felt then that he did not receive the attention he deserved his work. In addition, all the work done at Bletchley Park was also secret and could not tell anyone. Frustrated and sad, in 1948, mathematician Max Newman held a position in the mathematics department of the University of Manchester.

Newman's wife, writer Lyn Irvine, met Turing closely: "I had a strange way of not looking into the eyes. He was a silent man, speaking in a fine, stuttering voice. Or suddenly he thanked unconsciously and escaped the door."

In 1950 he published another great work. "Can machines think?" "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". He predicted intelligent machines capable of making logical deductions, learning and communicating. These machines would also be able to match human intelligence. And he proposed a famous test to measure whether a machine is as intelligent as man or not.

He also designed a chess program with his former partner David Gawe Champernowne. And in 1952, since there was no computer to run this program, Turing himself simulated the computer game, which took half an hour in each move.

That year he met the young Arnold Murray. They spent a night together. But Murray helped a friend enter the house and steal in Turing. Turing denounced the theft and told the police everything and had sex with Murray. Although Turing was convinced that there was nothing wrong with this activity, homosexual actions were crimes at that time.

He was sentenced, sentenced to prison or undergoing hormone therapy to reduce his sexual appetite. He chose the second.

And he kept working. He enters the field of biology, giving a mathematical explanation to the morphological development of the embryo and explaining that in sunflowers, pineapples and various plant structures appears the Fibonacci series.

However, the damage caused by estrogen injections was increasing. Turing's athletic body, brilliant marathon runner, was frustrating. He told a friend that they "gave me the breasts" and told him that the process was "hard" and "humiliating." He also felt that many of those with him had turned their backs on him.

On June 7, 1954, he was found dead in his house, accompanied by a bitten apple. Autopsy revealed that he died poisoned by cyanide. David Leavitt, Turing biographer, relates death to Edurnezuri. And it was Turing's favorite film, and in his film he often sang the spell that the witch sings when preparing the poisoned apple:

Dip the apple in the brew Let the Sleeping Death seep through