Alan Turing was born on June 23, 1912, in London. In his seminal 1936 paper, he proved that there cannot exist any universal algorithmic method of determining truth in mathematics and that mathematics will always contain undecidable propositions. That paper also introduced the “Turing machine”. His papers on the subject are widely acknowledged as the foundation of research in artificial intelligence. Alan is widely regarded as the father of computer science and artificial intelligence.
He was also gay and was not well accepted at the then homophobic world. Even though he was respected through his scientific discoveries, his sexual orientation was never well received and the British government publicly humiliated him. Alan, unfortunately, committed suicide at the age of 42 by eating an Apple that had a deadly chemical. Even though he lived a very short life, his scientific discovery changed the world and saved millions of lives. Sir Winston Churchill remarked that it is Alan’s work that helped shorten the World War II by at least two years. Below I will compile some of the top four scientific achievements that Alan achieved in his short extraordinary life.
Achievement 1: The Turing Test
Alan Turing believed that computers will one day be able to learn and think and prove this thesis he developed the Turing Test. He developed this test in 1951, calling it “The Imitation game” to settle the issue of machine intelligence. The test is fundamental in Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a method of examining whether or not a computer is capable of thinking like a human being.
He proposed that if a computer can imitate a human behavior or response under specific conditions then such a computer possess artificial intelligence. narrow AI (i.e task-specific) is all over our daily tech gadgets today from smartphones to the driverless cars being developed. Scientists today are working today in labs working to find the deep AI which is equivalent to a human being in terms of what it can achieve. ( i.e can learn, think and make its own decisions)
IBM Watson is perceived as one of the intelligent machines that may have passed or closed to passing the Turing Test.
Achievement 2: The Turing Machine
The Turing Machine was thought by Mathematician, Alan Turing, in 1936. The machine simulates any computer algorithm, no matter how complex it is. The Turing machine can compute anything that can be computed. The machine was actually a concept, not a piece of equipment, but its principles set the stage for the development of digital computers later in the twentieth century.
Achievement 3: The Ferranti Mark 1
The Ferranti Mark I computer installed at the University of Manchester in 1951 was the world’s first commercial computer. Alan Turing was the director of the university’s computer laboratory and wrote the operating manual for the Ferranti Mark I.
Achievement 4: The Bombe Machine- The WWII Hero
Without Alan’s work, the world would not be enjoying the advancements brought about by computers or even artificial intelligence in general. Alan was a great contributor to the building of The Bombe. This apparatus or machine helped the British break the ‘unbreakable’ Enigma code. The Nazis used the Enigma code for all their major communications during the second world war.
Because of this invention, the team that Alan’s led managed to decode thousands of messages made by the Nazis Enigma machines per month. The British prime minister Winston Churchill admitted that the WWII was shortened by at least two years, saving millions of lives, because of Alan’s work in The Bombe machine.