When the Olympic flame called by Manchester’s statue of Alan Turing on what would were his 100th birthday, 23 June last year, we saw the poignant highlight of a very good series of centenary celebrations.
For it was at Manchester University – on one side of the statue and its bench in Sackville Park while the city’s Gay Village is at the other – that the pc pioneer took the primary groundbreaking steps towards today’s ‘artificial intelligence’, bequeathing us the Turing Test for intelligence in machines.
It was also in Manchester that the area War II code-breaker was convicted in 1952 for having gay sex, subjected to state-enforced chemical castration and committed suicide two years later. What a contrast thon the Olympic relay, which Turing would have enjoyed as a marathon runner himself, came here to honour him. All year, he was at the centre of commemorations in additional than 40 countries, from Norway to Colombia and from the Philippines to Canada.
Designated as Alan Turing Year, 2012 saw an unprecedented level of interest within the man and his work, with public events, TV films, exhibitions and conferences big and small. Channel 4 showed the acclaimed film Britain’s Greatest Codebreaker – now edited and touring internationally as Codebreaker – and London’s Science Museum staged an exhibition called Codebreaker: Alan Turing’s Life and Legacy.
Still tryable online: Google’s Doodle tribute to the good man. Photograph: Google
Bletchley Park, with support from Google (which also did an outstanding doodle to mark the centenary), marketed an Alan Turing Monopoly set in time for Christmas stockings. Twitter was abuzz with Turingtalk and the Turing Year page drew followers from Lady Gaga’s Born This type Foundation to Gordon Brown’s wife Sarah. The Pet Shop Boys got along with the BBC Philharmonic to accomplish a Turing composition.
My own hectic Turing year, aside from many events within the UK, took in talks as far afield as New Zealand, Switzerland, China and Hong Kong, Taiwan, Greece, Hungary, Slovakia, the united states, Mexico and Brazil. Greater than simply amazing, the total great enterprise fitted brilliantly with the focal point on British science, innovation, and eccentricity which was so engagingly lauded within the Olympic opening and shutting ceremonies.
The Foreign Secretary, William Hague, paid tribute to Turing at Bletchley Park, and the top of GCHQ Iain Lobban spoke publicly in Leeds, about Turing as a
founder of the info Age whose work influenced everything from washing machines to smart phones.
I could even post my letters with an Alan Turing commemorative stamp.
But here we meet a very Alice-In-Wonderland mismatch between Establishment self-serving and individual genius. The important points of Alan Turing’s conviction for ‘a homosexual act’ – this kind of human rights violation for which we nowadays condemn other countries – could be easily found on the net or within the centenary edition of Andrew Hodges’ biography of Turing, as can evidence of his subsequent anguish. It was not just the enforced medication which affected and subsequently destroyed the glorious new the science; the general public humiliation also played its part. In 1952 Alan wrote to his friend Norman Routledge:
Turing believes machines think. Turing lies with men. Therefore machines don’t think.
It remains ery cruel. But in 2012 it was Manchester greater than some other city that took Alan Turing to its heart, honouring him with particular creativity, enthusiasm and sheer affection. There has been bubbling local pride within the undeniable fact that the primary ‘real’ computer on the planet, the ‘Manchester baby’ was Mancunian; and that the primary computer chess programme was run within the city by Turing’s friend Dietrich Prinz, who had previously been a student of Albert Einstein in Berlin. Much of this early history have been dropped at life on the city’s Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI); and through the year that came complete with an Alan Turing actor mingling with visitors.
Runners honour a runner. The Olympic flame at Turing’s statue in Manchester.
MOSI and the Manchester Museum also stretched our minds with Turing’s explanations of patterns in nature: embroidering Rudyard Kipling’s ‘How the Leopard Got Its Spots’ with super-clever mathematics of morphogenesis explaining moving stripes on tropical fish and giving computer simulations of emergent dappling of cows’ backs. Professor Bernard Richards, who worked with Turing on this area, gave talks, and was presented with an award by the Queen for his contribution of a morphogenesis memento for a 2012 time capsule. Most excitingly for countless school children was the Turing’s Sunflowers experiment from MOSI and the Manchester Science Festival, getting them counting whorls on sunflower heads to make sure Turing’s ideas concerning the link to ‘Fibonacci numbers’.
Computer science, whose origins return to Turing’s 1936 discovery of the Universal Turing Machine, was treated to an impressive international conference at Manchester town hall, with chess celebrity Gary Kasparov winning against Turing’s early computer chess program. In the course of the meeting, the Olympic flame reappeared outside.
The Alan Turing Cryptography Competition for schools run by Manchester University, was so popular that it’s far being repeated as I write. And maybe the leading contender for greatest fun was 2012 Manchester Pride, braving the complications of science with a complete week devoted to Turing and his record as an openly gay man in early 1950s Britain. It showed how he was before his time socially, in addition to in science.
The lonelieness of the long distance runner. Turing competing in school.
In his review of Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson’s centenary study of the digital world and its origins, Peter Forbes comments:
Britain’s societal failings are still painfully on show within the Establishment’s cack-handed efforts to compensate for the persecution Turing suffered.
Gordon Brown made a heartfelt apology in 2009; in 2012 Lord Sharkey called inside the Lords for a pardon, and MP John Leech’s Commons early day motion attracted 28 signatures from across the complete main parties. However the world still awaits a proper rebuttal of the historic injustice.
Today’s Cabinet, with out science graduate (the Minister for Universities and Science did politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford) is symptomatic of a historic lack of knowledge of and support for the original scientific achievements of the united kingdom. There’s no memorial to Alan Turing in London. The government’s refusal to grant him a pardon throughout the centenary year leaves instead a misguided conviction under a misguided law and an institution that did not get it and still doesn’t.
Our shame. Nonetheless it was a superb year and countless people gave time and effort to make that the case. Turing changed our world, and 2012 has made us all just a little more acquainted with how that happened – and of what could also be coming next.
Professor S. Barry Cooper is a mathematician on the University of Leeds. He chaired the Turing Centenary Advisory Committee which co-ordinated the Alan Turing Year and is President of the association Computability in Europe.
