Spotlight on Alan Turing

Hamster Races. We only had one entry into the Madame Curie lookalike contest and he was disqualified later, why do I even bother? Okay, I have no clue on that one. Trust me. We're about to talk about someone who's a real genius and so, uh it'll come through eventually where that quote comes from. So to start this this podcast off, we actually have a little Facebook feedback you be, and this comes from Brian, and Brian says, you guys should

definitely devote an entire podcast to Alan Turing at some point. Well, Brian, that point is now, well, who we're gonna do a spotlight on Alan Turing. I first became acquainted with Mr Touring's name while reading a novel, actually Neil Stevenson's Cryptonomicon, which is, as you might guess from the title, very heavily oriented around cryptanalysis, cryptography and cryptology, which I find fascinating. That's basically they're all revolving around codes and code breaking exactly.

And Touring was known as a very important person in the history of code breaking. Although uh, and it's interesting, I guess it depends on which circles you you talked to. You know what Touring was known for. So he's really known as a codebreaker, but he's also known as the sort of the father of computer science. Yes, that's true. That's true. Sort of depends on whom you asked. Very clearly, he had an extremely important role to play during World

War Two, but we'll we'll get into that first. Let's talk a little bit about Touring and where he came from and and sort of his background. He's one of those individuals that the more you read about him, the more you realize how incredibly remarkable this guy was. I liken him to Ada Lovelace in a way. Ada Lovelace was another person who had this amazing ability to understand mathematics on a level that is is completely foreign to me.

I mean, I I understand basic math. I don't understand mathematics the way Touring did, even at a young age. So Touring was born in nineteen twelve in Paddington, London. Both of his parents were from the upper middle class, which at that time was class was very very important in the UH in England still is to some extent, but not it's I don't think they're quite as class

conscious as they used to be. But at anyway, he was born to upper middle class parents who got him into public school UM, and he had a keen interest in math and science, physics in particular. Yes, Uh, In fact, he was incredibly gifted in in mathematics. He was reading as a teenager. He was reading UH papers written by Einstein and theorizing on um the nature of relativity, and and really understanding it in a way that I still struggle with today. So clearly a guy who whose genius

far outstrips any intelligence I might possess. I am more than happy to to admit that, because I certainly don't understand it on the level he did. While in school, he happened to meet a student who was a year ahead of him named Christopher more Comb, now whom he referred to as Chris, and Chris was another brilliant young student, someone who really had a very strong grasp on mathematics

and physics as well. And Chris and Allan found that talking together that they could kind of understand mathematics on an even deeper level by sharing their combined perspectives. And they struck up a very strong friendship. And unfortunately, Chris died in nineteen thirty. He was he was not He was not a healthy young boy as it turns out, So by nineteen Chris dies and that left a huge gap in Touring's life. I'm sorry you're about to say something. No,

I was. I was going to say, Uh, Jonathan and I took our our source information from a couple of really exhaustive sources. Um. I took a lot of mine from the from Touring's actual website, which is maintained by one of his biographers, Andrew Hodges. Yes. Yes, Andrew Hodges wrote a book called Alan Touring The Enigma. I highly

recommend this book. I've actually I read it ages and ages ago, and I revisited it for this podcast, and it is a very good biography that that really kind of dives into not just the the accomplishments that Touring achieved during his lifetime, and not only in the and the foundation he laid for computer science, but also his personal life and how that kind of shaped what he did and who he was. Yep, I haven't read it yet.

I want to pick it up. But the other source that I consulted for this, and I know that Jonathan did too, was the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is an awesome site to have used it for other podcasts.

But in doing the research and learning more about Chris more Com, I think that one of the interesting things that this pulled out for him from touring, based on the biographical the Hodges website, was that for some time, for two or three years afterwards, he spent a lot of time thinking about human consciousness and what happens to that information basically how I I assume from that that he was thinking about how the brain stores information and

where that information goes when somebody dies. Right, Yeah, he became very focused on the subjects of mind and matter. Yes, where where does where does one begin? On the other end, are they one and the same? Is the human mind just a you know? Is it just a material construct or? Is there some other element there that is indefinable really as far as you know we can understand right now. Um, this kind of led him into a study of physics yep.

And I think it has a lot to do with the uh, the genesis of the touring test, whether computers can can think. But these are things where we'll talk about more in a minute. But I think it's interesting that an event like this may have prompted him to consider more serious matters and and take him in different directions of study later in life. Yeah, yeah, it was. I would definitely call that a pivotal moment in his life. One wonders what his life would have been like had

had more Coum not died. So he graduates from public school and then goes to attend King's College at Cambridge University. Um, it's here where he really starts to study various kinds of deep mathematics, including probability and um number theory, stuff that goes well beyond my basic understanding. It's also where he first begins to come to grips with his sexuality.

Alan tour ing if you did not know I was a homosexual, and he kind of really started to discover this during college and college was a pretty um open environment compared to his public school. Like public school was a very controlled environment, a very conservative environment, and the college as was almost the opposite. So Touring really experienced a complete change in culture by the time he went to college. So I'm sorry I was going to say that.

He also during this period started to become involved with some very liberal thinkers of the time, UM, economists like like Keynes and Pigou. Um. You know, people have have suggested, I think that he may have been moving in so far as to be Marxist, but I don't believe he actually ever was formally affiliated with people like that. But he was. He was exposing himself to some very uh, some very liberal people at that point, and in a

variety of uh ways of speaking about it. Yeah, there were a lot of anti war intellectuals that he was he was friends with, or at least he moved in the same circles that they did. Um. He never really seemed to express a particularly strong political opinion. No, no, not not from what I've read. Um, this was in the in the early nineteen thirties, so we're talking the

period between worlds World wars, one and two. Um. And of course economics playing a terrific part in terrific I mean very large part in uh, the outbreak of World War two. Um. So you know these are these are things much on the minds of of people in the very early twentieth century. Certainly right. So in nineteen thirty four he graduates from King's College. In nineteen he's elected a fellow to the college, which means he actually draws a stipend. Uh. And in ninety six he's awarded a

Smith's Prize for his work in probability theory. So during this period he was starting to specialize in quantum mechanics and logic as well as probability. And then we get to nineteen thirty six, which is the year in which he theorized in a device called the touring machine. Yes, this was purely theoretical, not an actual physical device, but he theorized that it would be possible to create a machine that could complete a computational operation the same way

the human mind would. So it simulates what the human mind goes through to perform a very specific operation. Now, each each Turing machine could only perform one kind of operation. Yes, so uh, it wasn't like it would be like if you if you told one person they could only this is oversimplifying, but telling one person they could only add numbers, and another person they could only multiply numbers, they would not be able to swa oper roles at all. They

could only do that one simple operation. You could give them different numbers, but they could only perform that one operation upon the numbers. Then this led him to then theorize a universal touring machine. Yes, something that could handle more than one task, right, it could. It could perform all the operations that individual touring machine machines could perform. So the universal touring machine was sort of really a

theoretical computer. It was a computer that could perform any operation or algorithm, set of directions, set of instructions that the various other like individual theoretical touring machines could could perform. So again, this is all just the realm of ideas. Right now, we'd start at a physical machine. Yet, Yes, apparently um Touring believed that the universal touring machine. UM he probably didn't call it that. I don't know, I didn't read that, but that's of course what we call it.

Um He believed that the universal machine would operate according to a table of behavior, which people likened to a computer program. So basically those were the parameters under which it could perform different kinds of operations. But it's just funny that he had his own language. It's funny to me, but it makes all the you know, all the sense in the world when you didn't already have a paradigm. You know, we call them computer programs because everyone else does.

But he had his own language for this. But once you've understand sort of what he's talking about, you kind of go, oh, so that's what you think, right, So a couple of years ago by he gets a PhD in algebra and number theory, So no slouch there. Um, and and then he starts, um, he starts working on an interesting project for the British government. Um, so we're talking about eight. There's there's an event going on in Europe. Yeah,

there's a small event going on in Europe. There's a Germany is uh is becoming a bit of a problem. There's um, a World War two is breaking out at this point. I'm sorry, go ahead, no, as I as I previously alluded to, the the German economy has been very poor for a very long time for them, and so gradually as Adolf Hitler convinced that he could turn the country around where he given the opportunity to take

the reins and take power. Um, he basically convinced the Germans that you know, he would be the leader that would lead them to greatness. And in doing so they militarized of course, and of course Hitler had another agenda in mind as well. This was brought to you by stuff you missed in history class. Yeah, but no, it's but it's interesting to think about that that Touring was involved in. He was interested in things like, you know,

economics and things and mathematics. And the Germans had developed a very uh powerful mechanical code machine, yes, called the Enigma machine. Yes, so the German Enigma code machine was this device that allowed the Germans to encode um different commands. The Luftwaffa in particular was using it as well as the German Navy. Now, the luftwaff version was slightly simpler than the NAVL version, yes, and didn't have all that

lent on it. Oh sorry wrong, Yeah, it was in the air as opposed to underwater anyway, Um, touring began to work on the Enigma codes and he developed a device of his own U actually he developed along with some other people. He worked with several other people on this project, but together they developed a device called the bomb b O M B e yes and this was a decoding device, and the Luftaffa codes ended up being

the simplest to decode it. It It took more work to decode the naval ones, which were mainly UH concerning the U boats submersible vehicles, which was very important as far as the war in the Atlantic was concerned. Without those UH, without being able to decode those messages, the war may have gone very differently, at least the naval part of the war would have gone very differently. Um. So UH, he starts to break these codes, it's actually having a

measurable effect on the war. It's saving countless lives on the Allied side. Uh. He also, in nineteen forty two, interestingly enough, proposed marriage yes to Joan Clark, and then he retracted the proposal. She accepted, then he had to retract it, and he explained to her. I think this was one of those moments where it was probably another defining moment where he told her that he was homosexual and that he wouldn't that his therefore he couldn't really

marry her. And I think that was probably the moment where I mean, this is this is guesswork, but it seems like it's the moment where he decided that he wasn't going to pretend to be something he wasn't, which

unfortunately would lead to tragedy further down the line. Um. So in in nineteen four, this is getting close to the end of World War two, he actually first started talking about building a brain, an electronic simulation of a brain, and what it would take in order to achieve such a thing, and this would sort of be an electronic version of his Universal machine. Now, back when he was thinking about the Universal machine, it would have been mostly

a mechanical device, non electronic device. It was only through the developments of World War two, the techno technological developments of World War two, that electronics started to become more important than mechanical devices. So that's when he starts working in computer theory and and even computer software theory. Uh, again, this is all theoretical, but he starts to work. In forty seven, he starts working on the idea of programming

and neural nets. That's fascinating stuff. Yeah, talking about networks essentially years before we would have computer networks of any size, right, and he was he was even thinking about creating some sort of mechanical network that would have some sort of learning capability. Yes, so it's not just that it can carry out instructions, but that it can learn from the instructions you give it and build upon that. Yes, so

this is essentially artificial intelligence. This is really where he starts to to become interested in the subject of artificial intelligence and touring. You know, you could call him the father of computer science. You could also call him the father of artificial intelligence in a way. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Um. One other fascinating thing about him in that era, right and imediately post war um apparently part of his frustrations, as part of a way to alleviate the frustration he

was feeling with getting his work done. Now, he wasn't really recognized for his wartime work because so much of it was top secret, so you know, it's a sort of a way to deal with the stress of that. He took up running and almost qualified for the h British Olympic team as a marathon runner. And it's just one of those things where I'd always heard about his mathematical work and his work with computers. Mean really, you know, he sustained an injury, which unfortunately prevented him from being

really considered for that team, but as pretty remarkable. I mean, the guy was a phenomenal genius and potentially a world class athlete. Yes, there are stories about Touring, uh having fun by racing people cross the campuses of the various universities he worked at while they took public transportation and he would go on foot and beat them there. So I mean there was he definitely had a little bit

of a playful side to him. Um So. In nineteen fifty, Touring proposes something that plays a really important role in artificial intelligence. It's called the Touring test. And this was in a paper called Computing Machinery and Intelligence, which appeared in the journal Mind in nineteen fifty. Yes, and uh,

this was this was a really interesting philosophical point. Touring suggested that if you could build a machine that could imitate a thinking, living creature, um so that it could fool someone an interrogator, Uh, seventy percent of the time that the integator was talking to a human and not a machine. It would be said to pass the touring test, that would said it would be said that this was

a machine that could at least simulate intelligence. And Uh Hodges has a great section in his website that goes into a discussion about Descartes. Uh and Descartes actually theorized about something similar to this ages before Touring. Descartes said that that if we could build a machine that could imitate a living thing, we would still be able to

recognize it as a machine because it would lack understanding. Yes, so even if we could teach a machine to talk, it would just it would say words, but it wouldn't be meaningful. It couldn't respond in a meaningful way, so it could not be able to demonstrate any sort of

understanding of what it was talking about. Descartes was actually, in a way, Descartes was really forward thinking in this because he was essentially stating that the problem of teaching a machine two comprehend and respond to stimuli is far more complicated than anyone would imagine. And it turns out

that's true. It is really really hard to teach a machine too two detect, interpret, and respond to stimuli beyond a basic level, like you could teach a machine quote unquote teach a machine to detect temperature and move away from temperatures that are too hot. But two be able to converse is a much different task, much much higher level of thinking required in order to accomplish that task exactly. And that's that maybe why Touring specifically chose conversation as

the task to test in the Touring test. It makes Some people have objected to that, saying that conversation is not really a test of intelligence, but Touring had various responses to these objections. In his paper, He said that this is a quote, I believe that in about fifty years time, it will be possible to program computers with

a storage capacity about ten to the ninth power. Tend to the ninth power of what I have no idea because he didn't specify in this particular quote to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than seventy chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning. So the invitation game is kind of what I was alluding to earlier. You have an interrogator who is asking questions of two subjects.

One of those two subjects is a computer, right, the other is a human being, and the interrogator doesn't know which. Yeah, it has no way of seeing like the interrogator. It does not have a line of sight to the subjects. The interrogators essentially asking questions, usually like through a terminal, so you're typing the man and you're seeing the responses

on the screen. Um. And after five minutes of questioning, if that interrogator is unable to determine which is the human which is the computer, then that device may very well pass the touring test. Now, when we say with chance, that means that over multiple tests, UM, with multiple interrogators, that that ends up being chance or better that um, the interrogators unable to make that determination. That's when you say you've kind of hit this artificial intelligence level as

defined by touring. UM. Now, some people would say that, well, if you just designed a computer that had a deep enough vocabulary and a basic set of rules that told it how grammar works, so essentially a syntax telling it how syntax works, UM, it could possibly fool people, but doesn't mean that it's intelligent. Tourings responses, So what to your From your perspective, it seems as if the machine

is intelligent, and isn't that all that matters? Right, because you could argue, well, I can talk to the dumbest person on the planet and they're gonna at least be able to understand certain things I say, as opposed to this machine that doesn't really understand it. Durings response to that is, how do you know? The only way we

know that anything's intelligent is through our own experience. We don't like, Chris is looking at me, and I'm talking to Chris, but Chris doesn't know if I'm intelligent because Chris only has his own experience. He knows that he's intelligent in the sense that you know, he's able to think and process information. I appear to be able to do that, But that could all just be an incredible simulation. There's no way for you to know correct. Same thing

with the machines. Turing is like, Hey, we can't really know that anyone else is intelligent, therefore it doesn't matter, so the same thing should apply to machines. Shut up at your face. I have long suspected that Jonathan Strickland is in fact a machine. Yeah, I you know, I let me put it this way. I want to be a replicant. I want to be a replican Okay, I like that one. Okay, so this is nifty. When he proposed the Turing test in nineteen fifty two, we we

reach a really unfortunate time during Touring's life. The British government arrests him or for being a homosexual. This is again the the UK had very strict laws, conservative laws, UM, and he rather than going to prison, he elected to undergo injections which would decrease his libido hormone injections. Yes, so essentially this is it's chemical castration is what the what's technically referred to as UM. He did that for

at least a year. UM. But part of that sentence also meant that he lost all of his clearance security clearance that he had as working for various UM projects and government uh well government projects as well as as his university once so he lost all of that. He lost his security clearance because UM he could not as as a convicted criminal could not retain it. UM. This possibly lead to depression. It's hard to say because he wasn't really communicative. But on June seven, ninety four, he

took his own life. He committed suicide by ingesting cyanide pills. Yes, they they found him. Actually I believe it was his housekeeper who found him, uh with an apple which had been partially eaten. Um. Apparently the police revealed that they thought it was a suicide. Although the apparently the his mother believed that he might have been doing a science experiment with cyanide and had some on his hands and

may have accidentally ingested the poison. And I actually saw somebody and may have even been in the Hodges reference where he They said he may have planned it specifically that way, specifically to convince his mother that it was an accident, to make her feel better about it. She wouldn't be heartbroken that her son committed suicide. Right. So when we say committed suicide, that's the generally held belief that was established by the police. Um. There are there

is the possible there's the possibility that it was an accident. UM, although I can I think that's probably ah not likely, that's true. On September ten, two thousand nine, the British government UM the Prime Minister Gordon Brown, issued a formal apology to Touring for the way that the country treated him, considering that he was a war hero really and his

contributions to computer science were phenomenal. Um. And they said that, you know, treating any human being that way was reprehensible and that it was inexcusable, and that they offered a very profound apology, not just to Touring, but to everyone who had to undergo this kind of oppression during that period of British history, and that that was just not it was it was inhumane, is what he was essentially saying.

But that specifically to Touring, someone who gave such huge contributions to the United Kingdom and the world, it was particularly tragic. Yes, he certainly helped win the war for the Allies, or at least shorten it considerably, right, He saved countless lives, uh, you know, on on the Allied side. So he really was in every sense of the word

a hero. Um. So it was you could say the cynical thing about, well, this apology comes fifty years too late, but ah, another way of looking at it is that it was it was a way of it was a way of admitting that these policies were we're wrong and I think that was. It was an important step really, yeah, yeah, you know, to maybe change the mood a little bit, since its we're ending on a sort of a down note. Um.

And when I say sort of, I don't mean sort of. Um. One of the things that I had never heard before. Some people feel that there may be an homage two touring in one of today's tech companies, that being the logo of Apple Computer, the Apple with the bite taking. However, the original logo for the company, um, which is funny if you've ever seen it, and you see today's logo,

they're completely different. The original logo looks like a woodcut of Isaac Newton sitting under the tree, you know, for the apocryphal story of the apple clunk and them on the head and going, hey, there's gravity. Uh. The Apple did not actually say that, No, it did not. Neither did he, but it is an appealing story. Oh, now that we've gotten to the core of that. Um, it apparently is not true. They were already using the name Apple and uh. Um. The different colors on the Apple logo,

UM do not represent tourings homosexuality. Um. In fact, they may. They probably had everything to do with Steve jobs, wanting to promote the multicolor Apple two UM abilities, and so they added the colors to the logo for that reason. But it is kind of an interesting I mean, when you see it, you go, oh, well, you know that

very well could be. I don't know that Apple has ever issued a formal um statement regarding that connection, but most people that I read on that subject say, you know, well, if Newton was the very first reference and they had already been calling themselves Apple, it's probably not an homage to Touring, but he certainly did make significant contributions to

UH computer science. And I was even reading in that UM the about the new Jane Smiley book about remember when we talked about the very very first computer UM. You know, Touring was working all in the same time as the Soviet scientists and the folks at Iowa State back in the day, and they were all sort of working on different methods of getting UM, making mechanical and

electronic calculations in different ways. UM. But it's it's fascinating that, you know, these pioneers were completely on their own, working independently from one another, and all making these significant contributions. It's it's kind of a shame though, that Tourings contributions were known so much later because they were classified, and so people really didn't realize what an important person he

was in the field of computer science until so much later. Yeah, a lot of his contributions, even the ones that weren't classified, um ended up being like he would get beaten to the punch by someone else, but intended to be people that he worked with that and and they were building on his work, and he was building on theirs. From from Hodge's book, I got the I mean, I don't

know how accurate the sentiment is. My own. My own interpretation was that Touring wasn't really he wasn't obsessed with credit. He wasn't really that wasn't important to him. What was important to him was making these connections. Uh. We didn't mention this, but towards the end of his life he Touring had this thing throughout his life where he would switch gears and suddenly be really interested in a seemingly unrelated field of study and yet find ways to connect

it to things that he was already pretty well schooled in. Ya. As a matter of fact, I'm sorry. At the at the time he died, he was involved in biology and physics experiments, which makes all the world of sense. You might say, cyanide, why would he have sign on in

his hands. He's a you know, mathematician, he's a computer scientist. Now, he was actually interested in all kinds of science, right, so by the end of his life he was looking at biology and and nonlinear uh mathematics that apply to biology. So he, like I said, he was a really remarkable guy. He found connections between things that most of us we look at and we just think of as being completely compartmentalized different subjects, right, like there's a hard line between

this subject and that subject. And Touring was saying, no, no, they're all the same thing. You just don't see the numbers like I do. And I'm thinking, Wow, this guy. And you know, he was reportedly shy and awkward, not a very good conversationalist. Um. I think I read somewhere that his speech was halting. Yeah, he sounds like he's kind of like one of those guys who was just perfectly happy to have his close set of friends and to be able to work on these these complicated problems

and that was that was really all he needed. Um. And you know he and the fact that he was constantly learning was pretty inspirational too. So I guess that wraps up this discussion about Alan Touring. UM. Like I said, he's a very interesting person. You can find plenty of information on the web about him, and you can also pick up that book, the The Alan Touring The Enigma UM. That's a it's a good book, and the Stanford Encyclopedia has an exhaustive and exhausting entry just on the touring

test alone. There's also an entry about Alan Touring himself. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's funny because you think in a philosophy UM material that he wouldn't But really, when you get down to it, the touring test is it's part computer science, part philosophy. Yeah, artificial intelligence definitely has a lot of philosophy to it. I should also point out that Touring was not really concerned with machines gaining any sort of

UM self awareness or consciousness. He was talking on intelligence and consciousness as two separate things, which, as we've discussed before, you know that's that's an important thing to to distinguish intelligence and consciousness because you know, I'm often conscious, rarely intelligent. All Right, So if you guys have any comments, questions, any suggestions for future topics, especially you do I think we should do one on Bletchley Park. Oh okay, yeah,

Bletchley Park. Let us know if you think that that would work, If you if you'd like to hear more on on that. Because the code breakers of World War Two, it's yeah, it's always fascinating. We can go into the Navajo codes and things of that nature. One of my first big articles was about code breaking. Big articles here at how stuff works dot com is well if you If you have any suggestions, you can let us know on Facebook or Twitter are handled. There is text stuff

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