65 years ago Alan Turing, the “Father of Computing” and AI died
His story became more popular with the movie “The Imitation Game” with Benedict Cumberbatch in 2014. Prior to that, it was limited to professional and tech-niches. An injustice to a person "present" in all our institutions, offices, homes and even in our pockets: without Alan Turing, the "Father of Computing", we might have been much later on.
June 7, 1954 is special because on that date died the man who avoided the deaths of millions of people in World War II. His early farewell, the result of a cruel persecution, is then always remembered even more today when this landmark marks 65 years.
Turing was born in London on June 23, 1912, where he had a distant childhood from his parents, with his older brother and a retired couple, who looked after the children. He has always fueled an interest in cryptography, and by the time he was a teenager in 1930, he would create what we can now consider the first computer and artificial intelligence (AI) project.
The Turing Machine
At the age of 24, after graduating from Cambridge University in mathematics, Turing designed a machine capable of automatically manipulating symbols in a system of its own. From this, it was possible to create a scheme capable of processing codes around cognitive sets. This made him famous, and in 1938 the slight, shy, genius, and eccentric - often arrogant - boy joined GC&CS, the British Intelligence messaging office.
Codes were encrypted at the time in much the same way as they are currently on WhatsApp or bank transactions.
The team he started commanding (and bothering him, since he was a difficult person, according to reports) was to decode the Enigma, a German rotor-type typewriter that changed its codes on a daily basis - something very similar to that. that we use on WhatsApp or bank transactions today. It was precisely to shuffle the messages exchanged between Hitler's troops.
Revealing this secret could help the military intercept the encrypted messages Germans exchanged during World War II. The only way to decipher this mystery was by using the same original encryption key, which was changed monthly, because the rotors were capable of formulating thousands of combinations - and no one had threatened to bring it up until then.
The revelation of the Enigma
Turing discovered how to decipher the Enigma Machine using an electromechanical technique called “bombs”: mechanisms that allowed multiple simultaneous text analysis at human-like speed. With that in hand, by 1942 the English could read 50, 000 messages a month, one per minute. So they were able to unravel the footsteps of the Nazi onslaught, including where their submarines were and even where they would attack on D-Day.
Following, the story we all know is that England managed to resist Hitler and respond in the campaign that defeated the Germans. When the conflict ended, Turing went to the National Physics Laboratory and was anonymous, as both his identity and all the projects he worked on for British Intelligence were kept secret for decades.
The Turing Test and Early Death
Still, in 1950 he developed the so-called “Turing Test”, used to this day to identify AI: if in a real-time textual conversation between a human and a machine there is no way to discern who is who at any given time, the system can be considered a smart automaton.
Being gay was considered a crime in Britain until the late 1960s.
Even with this incredible discovery, the scientist could not have been punished in the worst way out of sheer ignorance, fear and violence: he was gay and that was a crime in Britain until 1967. Because of this, in the early 1950s, was convicted and humiliated in public, prevented from pursuing computer studies, and received injections of female hormones in a chemical "castration."
Disturbed by the changes in his body and the life he maintained after being cut off from everything he loved most, he ate a poisoned apple and then died at 41. But if you depend on us, you will always be remembered for being the “Father of Computing” and contributing not only to the evolution of technology, but also to humanity.
65 years ago Alan Turing, the “Father of Computing” and AI via TecMundo died
