Alan Mathison Turing (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist.  Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.  Despite these accomplishments, he was not fully recognised in his home country, due to his homosexuality, and because much of his work was covered by the Official Secrets Act.  The Alan Turing law is now an informal term for a 2017 law in the United Kingdom that retroactively pardoned men cautioned or convicted under historical legislation that outlawed homosexual acts. 

​

During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School, Britain's code breaking centre that produced Ultra intelligence.  He devised techniques for speeding the breaking of German ciphers, including improvements to the pre-war Polish a bombe method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine.  Turing addressed the problem of artificial intelligence with an experiment known as the Turing test, an attempt to define a standard for a "intelligent" machine, which could be said to "think" if a human interrogator could not tell it apart, through conversation, from a human being.

​

In 2014, an American historical drama film The Imitation Game, directed by Morten Tyldum and written by Graham Moore, was released, based on the biography Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges.  The film's title refers to Turing's proposed experiment, which he discussed in his 1950 paper on artificial intelligence entitled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence".

​

Set in an alternative history timeline in 1980s, in which the UK lost the Falklands War in Ian McEwan’s novel published in 2019, Machines Like Me, Alan Turing is still alive and self-driving cars already exist.  The story revolves around the android Adam invented by Turing and its relationship with humans, which involves the formation of a love triangle and provokes thoughts on the issue of human rationality.  Eventually, the ambivalent human subjectivity succumbs to the transhuman character whose rationality is consciously formulated by artificial intelligence.

 

Works cited:

“Alan Turing.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 29 Mar. 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing.

​

“The Imitation Game Official Trailer #1 (2014) - Benedict Cumberbatch Movie HD.” YouTube, uploaded by Movieclips Trailers, 21 Jul 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuPZUUED5uk&t=32s.

​

Images:

Wikimedia Foundation. "Alan Turing." ibid.

​

Andgasow.  “Turing's rebuilt bombe machine.”  Uploaded by Wikimedia Foundation, 2 Nov 2010, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_Game.

​