That's what it took. Together with three others, Alan Turing and Joan Clarke broke the Enigma code, but they also built the foundation for today's computers.
Turing had a vision of thinking machines. Machines that could calculate every bit of information just as well as a human brain.
"Of course machines can't think as people do. A machine is different from a person. Hence, they think differently. The interesting question is, just because something, uh... thinks differently from you, does that mean it's not thinking? Well, we allow for humans to have such divergences from one another. You like strawberries, I hate ice-skating, you cry at sad films, I am allergic to pollen. What is the point of... different tastes, different... preferences, if not, to say that our brains work differently, that we think differently? And if we can say that about one another, then why can't we say the same thing for brains... built of copper and wire, steel?"
- Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, The Imitation Game
Alan Turing set the foundation for so many things.
He built a machine that saved millions of lives.
He invented a test that is used to test for true AIs in today's programming world.
He expanded on the idea of reprogrammable clock work machines.
Turing set in motion a development which lead to me being able to even write this text.
He was told to destroy every trace of the work he, Joan Clarke, and their colleagues had done at Bletchley Park (understandable, since the work was highly classified and extremely dangerous, intelligence wise).
He was sentenced to chemical castration for being a homosexual. Not even his contributions during WW2 seemed to matter in comparison to the horrors of him being attracted to men instead of women.
He took his own life in 1954.
In 2011, Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an official apology.
In 2014, the Queen pardoned Alan Turing. 49 000 others are still waiting for their pardons for the crime of homosexuality.
This is a very short text about Alan Turing, mainly just me needing to write something to get this frustration out of my system. For more in depth information, check this Wikipedia article and its sources.
