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Leaders & Success
No End To His Imagination
BY KEN SPENCER BROWN
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Imagination should have no limits. And for Alan Turing, it didn't.
By refusing to envision only what was strictly practical, he expanded the
bounds of what was possible. Blending his command of mathematics with
boundless imagination, he pioneered the notion of a thinking machine and
paved the way for the computer age.
By the time he died at age 42, Turing had become a renowned British
mathematician, logician, cryptographer and war hero.
Later, Turing's most advanced ideas became a foundation for computer
science with the dawning of the digital age he'd envisioned. If things like
software code, cryptography and artificial intelligence leave you
scratching your head, just imagine wrestling with those concepts decades
before the invention of the computer.
Turing (1912-54) wasn't an outstanding student. But as a child, his focus
was already keen, and he loved to experiment. In her 1959 biography of her
son, "Alan M. Turing," Sara Turing recalled that some of Turing's
grade-school inventions included a typewriter and a camera.
His math skills quickly showed themselves, though the young Turing drew
complaints from teachers for his messiness and penchant for neglecting the
basics as he dived ahead into more advanced topics. As a house master put
it in 1927, Turing was "trying to build a roof before he has laid the
foundations."
Actually, Turing figured that as he already understood basic concepts, it
was little use wasting time on them when he could home in on more complex
ideas. He was thinking beyond the educational system - and it would become
key to his future breakthroughs.
Early Inspiration
Despite his shyness and occasional social awkwardness, friends knew Turing
as an avid runner and rower, and fiercely loyal. Normally gentle in speech,
Turing would defend his friends' views intensely when they were challenged.
They often inspired him, too. The death of a close schoolmate in February
1930 sparked Turing's first published thoughts in metaphysics. In letters
to the friend's mother, Turing pondered the connection between the human
mind and the brain. These ideas sparked his thinking on artificial
intelligence, which tries to model the human brain and the thought process.
Turing failed to win a scholarship to his first-choice school, Trinity
College, because of his erratic academic performance. But he didn't let
that hold him back.
Turing quickly made a name for himself at King's College in Cambridge, his
second choice, on a math scholarship. He studied hard, striving to excel in
each class. In 1935, at age 22, he received a fellowship there - a
remarkable achievement for one so young.
Still, he stayed his usual humble self. On his first night as a fellow,
Turing's mother recalled that her son was happier that he'd beaten the
school's provost at rummy, not that he was a fellow at 22.
And though entitled to dine at the school's "high table," some complained
that he seemed to prefer the company of other undergraduates. In her
biography, Sara Turing says this was a sign her son simply didn't want to
flaunt his new privileges.
This isn't to say he held himself in low esteem. On the contrary, Turing
was confident in his work, certain that he'd win academic prizes for
several papers he submitted over the years. Invariably, he did.
Even so, Turing insisted on giving others proper credit in collaborative
projects, often downplaying his own contributions. This was one of many
thoughtful traits that won Turing friends.
On May 28, 1936, he submitted a paper titled "On Computable Numbers, With
an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem."
Designed to solve a 400-year-old logic problem, Turing described the
functions of a machine that could solve any problem stated as a
mathematical algorithm.
Now known as a Turing machine, the theoretical device was the first to
conceive of a general-use device that could store data and instructions and
be programmed for lots of different math problems. Turing's attempts to
build such a machine failed, but many of his ideas helped create the
electronic computer.
He wasn't living in a theoretical world, however; Turing searched for
practical applications for his work. He put some of his ideas to use during
World War II, when he helped crack secret codes used by the German air
force. Turing's "bombe" machine sped up the decryption process through an
electro-mechanical process of elimination.
Cracking the Enigma codes used by the German navy proved tougher. But
Turing loved a challenge.
In 1936 - 11 years before the invention of the transistor and more than
two decades before the integrated circuit - he envisioned his Turing
machine as a mechanical device. This made it too slow for practical use.
His exposure to the military's electronic calculators pulled his earlier
ideas within reach.
In 1946, Turing got the OK from England's National Physical Laboratory to
create an electronic version of the Turing Machine, now dubbed the
Automatic Computing Engine or ACE. It aimed to rival a planned U.S. system
called the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer.
As biographer Andrew Hodges notes in "Alan Turing: the Enigma," Turing's
ACE was a radical break from the electronic calculators of the time. It
could be set up for all sorts of calculations, making it far more useful
than existing machines.
"He had created something quite original and something all of his own,"
Hodges wrote. "He had invented the art of computer programming."
The machine was never built, but Turing's ideas played a big role in other
early computers, including one built in 1948 that proved his basic ideas.
Yet Turing continued imagining what the still-crude technology could do.
Ahead Of His Time
In 1950, he published the seminal essay "Computing Machinery and
Intelligence" in the journal Mind. Here, he proposed the question "Can
machines think?"
He didn't believe there was an answer, but suggested that computers would
someday be able to fool humans into believing they could think.
He proposed what is now called the "Turing Test," an experiment to see
whether people could tell human from machine in a typewritten chat. The
test is still used today in artificial intelligence experiments.
In the paper, Turing also was one of the first to suggest that computers
would someday triumph over humans at chess.
Again, he was way ahead of his time. A computer didn't beat a human until
1958, playing against a secretary who'd learned how to play the game only
an hour before.
Computers wouldn't become decent chess players until 1962, and wouldn't
beat the best players in a regular game until 1997. That's when IBM's Deep
Blue machine defeated champion Garry Kasparov.
Despite his work in artificial intelligence, Turing was no robot. He had a
deep concern for other people. When colleagues went through difficult
periods, Turing helped them in their research to ease their schedule, or
lent a sympathetic ear. Compassion, he believed, was as important as
innovation.
And technology, in Turing's eyes, was no substitute for humanity.
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R. A. Hettinga