Proximate Cause & Goodness of FitI'm not too proud to admit that the impetus for my picking up this biography was a trailer for the upcoming film on Alan Turing and his involvement with cracking the Enigma code during WWII ( The Imitation Game ). However, if you are interested exclusively (or even primarily) in the cryptanalytic exploits of Turing et al. at Bletchley Park then this is probably not — repeat not the Turing book for you.While Andrew Hodges thoroughly covers Turing's activities during the Second World War, this is just one piece of the whole. As one might expect of a book with an introduction by Douglas Hofstadter, it is an examination of both function and form. Alan's experiences were what they were because of who he was, and, in turn, these experiences made him into the man, the enigma he became. The Young Turing MachineAndrew Hodges, and Henrik Olesen, the artist behind "Some Illustrations to the Life of Alan Turing," both depict the young Alan Turing as a child inquisitive, and bright beyond his years. Alan, even in his earliest years, exhibited what Hodges refers to as a "desert island" mentality. If Alan had a problem, he relied on his own ingenuity to find an answer (e.g. inventing a machine to count gear revolutions and make adjustments as needed for his broken bicycle chain). The young genius mind, however, outside of a vacuum, does not necessarily coalesce easily with the world around it. This was certainly true of Alan's early experiences in the English public school environment.* Alan was what some might refer to as "extremely pick-on-able." Thus, when he received a copy of Edwin Tenney Brewster's Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know on behalf of an unnamed benefactor in 1922, Alan was undoubtedly relieved to be able to escape into a world of science, numbers and natural order. Brewster portrayed the human body as a machine; one with duties, tasks, functions, and, perhaps more importantly, one that could be understood through the faculties of reason.Obedience to Authority & The Imitation GameIn 1926, at the age of 13, Alan (left, below) was sent to the Sherborne School. With an emphasis good citizenship, and the individual's duty to fit into the system of their small society for the greater good (none of which included becoming a "man of science), Sherborne was not a good fit for Alan. However, things began to turn around for Alan in 1928, when he met Christopher Morcom. Morcom, one year ahead of Alan at Sherburn and a member of a different "house," shared Alan's passion for science, maths, and exploration of the natural world. Unlike Alan, however, Morcom was able to integrate these interests with scholastic success. The letters between Alan and Christopher during vacations from Sherborne are filled with an excited energy that comes with having someone with whom to share new discoveries. Christopher was both Alan's mentor and, as portrayed by Hodges, his first love. It's not clear whether this intimacy between the two was physical in nature, but the magnitude of Christopher's place in Alan's heart was made acutely and painfully clear when Christopher died suddenly of bovine tuberculosis in 1930. The letters between Christopher Morcom's mother and Alan (a correspondence that continued for many years) reflect their shared grief in losing Christopher. The experience changed Alan in many ways, including a renewed dedication to honoring Christopher's memory by pursuing the interests they had shared (which, despite their youth, had included quantum physics, and Einstein's Relativity: The Special and the General Theory ).An Ordinary English Homosexual Atheist MathematicianThough, unlike Christopher, Alan did not win a scholarship to his first choice, Trinity, he was admitted and matriculated to King's College, Cambridge in 1931. Though Alan remained secluded at King's, he was well-suited to its norms. In addition to the academic caliber of his professors and classmates, it was a socially and politically liberal environment; and it was in this context, that Alan became somewhat matter-of-factly open in his homosexuality.Not knowing much about Cambridge (or really any university) in the 1940s, I was not clear as to whether Hodges' references to the life of an "ordinary english homosexual..." were made in jest. However, though Hodges is clear that this was not an easy life, it seems that it was much easier in the context of King's College.Decidability, Computability & the EntscheidungsproblemIt is because of my own descriptive shortcomings that I won't be saying much about the content of the foundational problems (and paradoxes) in math and logic being asked and addressed by Turing and his contemporaries in the 1920s and 1930s. Suffice it to say that if you're operating under the impression that any system of mathematical logic can be complete, consistent and decidable, you might want to take a gander at some of Kurt Gödel's early work, and Turing's On Computable Numbers (though some might direct you toward the papers of Alonzo Church).Before you say, ‘well who cares?’ Let it be known that the very notion of "computability" (in a time when what was meant by "computer" is akin to what we think of as a "writer" - one doing the writing/one doing the computing) was new. Furthermore, this was the point at which Turing made a huge leap in the conceptual connection between abstract symbols and the physical world. Like Schrödinger's cat, the Universal Turing Machine was a thought experiment, the elegance of which lies in its simplicity. Turing's conception (based on the idea of a typewriter) is that there is a machine that has a tape, which is divided into squares. Each square can bear a symbol. At a any given moment, one square is "in the machine," this is the scanned square, and it bears the scanned symbol. Doesn't sound like much, I know, but here's the thing: the state of the machine (with its finite table of actions) can be determined by a singly expression using the symbols (which can be limited to two)...and there's recursion. It makes more sense if you read it from the experts!To Oz and BackIt's the mid-1930s at this point, and Princeton is a pretty happening place. Turing, offered a fellowship there, crossed the pond to work with John von Neumann (who Hodges likens to the Wizard of Oz). Things just didn't work out as planned. Princeton was the height of wealth and aristocratic excess from Turing's point of view, and Turing was proving again the difference between having brilliant ideas and impressing them on the world.However, Turing did have a good time at Princeton when taking part in "treasure hunts" consisting of series of encrypted clues. So, when Turing turned down a position at Princeton, and went back to Cambridge in 1938, his experiences stateside came in handy.The Enigma & Bletchley ParkPrior to Britain's declaration of war, Alan Turing was (surprisingly) the first and only mathematician recruited to work at the super secret Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), and later moved to the cryptanalytic HQ at Bletchley Park. Alan, who had long dreamed of a chess-playing machine, suddenly had a practical problem for his obsession. “Before the war my work was in logic and my hobby was cryptanalysis, and now it is the other way round.” How so? Well, von Neumann's theory of ‘minimax’ strategies (the application of probabilities to any game between two players such that one chooses the “least bad” option) — one of making decisions in the absence of perfect information, had direct applications in strategic combat.And, of course there was decryption of Enigma messages to be done. Alan's ability (and desire) to bridge the gap between mathematics and engineering was, for the first time, seen by others as an asset. Turing's thought experiments were being translated into actual electronic machinery— the Bombe (below), and the Colossus. To be clear, it was the Bombe that was used to crack the Enigma. However, the Colossus was the first computer that approached Turing's conception of "universality" in that it was programmable. Many of those working at Bletchley were Wrens (seen below with the Colossus), members of the Women's Royal Naval Service. For Turing this was his first contact with women, including Joan Clarke. The two were briefly engaged, but this was broken off in 1941 when Turing informed Clarke of his homosexuality. The Heart in ExileTuring had been afforded more freedom during the war than he, perhaps, realized at the time. At the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) Turing completed the design for an Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), but in the face of bureaucracy and departmental divisiveness, he had almost no control over its engineering and construction. “Alan Turing might be Valiant-for-Truth, but even he had been led into the work of deception by science, and by sex into lying to the police.” Outside of the cloistered world of Cambridge, England was not exactly gay-friendly (didn't Oscar Wilde get hard labor for that?). In "exile" in Manchester, our ordinary English homosexual atheist, when burgled by the friends of a young man he brought home, reported the larceny to the police. However, by engaging in such “sexual perversion,” Turing had placed himself outside of the protection of the law. Turing was sentenced not to prison, but chemical castration by estrogen injections.America was no better (just ask Lou Reed—his parents sent him for electroshock therapy, and that was for bisexuality). Having decided that homosexuals presented a “security risk,” Turing was banned from the United States as a whole.In a twisted, endless loop, intolerance for homosexuality put any homosexual at risk for blackmail, which, in turn, made homosexuals a security risk, thereby increasing the intolerance with which we began.On June 8th, 1954 Alan Turing was found dead in his home, lying in his bed. The identified the cause as cyanide poisoning, and the post-mortem inquest easily ruled it a suicide. In his house they found a jar of potassium cyanide, and a jam jar of cyanide solution. Next to his bed was a half-eaten apple. ____________________________________________* For those of you who, like myself, live west of the Atlantic, "public school" in Britain is pretty much the opposite of what it means here (basically, it's the equivalent of the American private/boarding school...although most of us don't spend 15 years there).
I found Alan Turing the enigma by Andrew Hoges quite interesting and maddening. Interesting because of the genius and achievements of Turning, which are described in some detail (much to the author's credit) but maddening because of the sociopolitical asides about Turing's homosexuality (which was illegal in the UK during his lifetime), not just as they relate to Turing himself but to further an agenda of the author that detracts from Turing's story. I say this despite the evidence that homophobia drove Turning to commit suicide, because the author's preoccupation with gay rights is sadly far out of proportion to what Turing deserved, and largely beside the point as well.What follows is largely personal opinion about the Turing Test, which I feel has created a rather trivialized notion of what constitutes computer intelligence.In a famous article for the magazine Mind circa 1950, Turning proposed what has ever since been called the Turing Test, to determine when or whether the point has been reached that a computer could be considered 'intelligent'. In a Gedankenexperiment a computer and a reasonably knowledgeable person are placed in separated rooms, but are allowed to communicate to one another via teletype. Turing reasoned that if the human (or the majority of a series of humans) could not determine whether the computer was merely a machine or was a human, then it would be reasonable to call that computer 'intelligent'. Another way of putting this is this: If a computer could plausibly field any series of questions put to it by a human, such that the human has no reason to believe that his or her counterpart was a machine, than the machine could be considered 'intelligent'. I shall return to this later.Turing's brilliant work in the 1930s (some in conjunction with Alonzo Church) and, in particular, his invention of Turing Machines, a conceptual machine that he proved would be capable of performing any calculation that any computer could do established that computing machines were indeed mathematically viable. And, indeed, a Turing Machine can be used to determine whether some problems are computable at all, or would take an inordinate amount of time to solve, and whether the computation process ever ends (the last is called "The Halting Problem").This conceptual machine consisted simply of a paper tape of infinite length to the left and right of a read/print head. Using a character set of only two or three symbols (e.g. space, 0 and 1) the read/print head could, much like a typewriter, be advanced or moved back a space at a time, could optionally print a character, but, unlike a typewrite, could also read the character under it or erase or replace it.The way a Turing Machine is programmed is with a "state table". A state table can be expressed by a table or graph, which, mathematically speaking, consists of nodes and directed edges. In English, a node is drawn as a circle, perhaps identified with a label (e.g. A,B,..,etc) and represents a "state" (used in the sense of "a state of action"). Directed edges are simply lines terminated by arrows that indicate their direction. The edges point to and connect different nodes or arch back to connect a node to itself.Each node represents an action taken by the head, and each node represents what state to move to when a space or 0 or 1 are encountered by the read/print head. [This is the simplest explanation of what are in fact a whole family of state machines with still more functions.]It is nearly impossible to conceive that any algorithmic computation done by a computer can be done by a Turing Machine, but I believe that this is undisputed (possibly excepting computations that might be done on a quantum computing machine).The other basis for Turing's well-deserved fame is that he was the principle designer of the "Blechley Bombe", aided by many others, which famously broke the Enigma code of the Luftwaffe, which gave such an edge to the RAF in the Battle of Briton it might be said to have been critical to the outcome of World War II. However, this was a tightly held secret until until many years after the War, and lead to many revisions of the history of WWII, not to mention augmenting Turing's reputation.Although many take the Turing Test as the gold standard for determining whether a computer is 'intelligent', I feel it is a flawed argument. I feel that the output of a computer (such as Deep Blue defeating Gary Kasparov or IBM's successful assault on the quiz show Jeopardy) although perhaps wondrous or exciting, proves nothing about it's intelligence. I feel that a valid version of the Turning Test would be if humans could not determine whether or not a computer is a machine or person, but only if the computer programmed itself by its own volition>. Only then could it be truthfully said that the computer was equal to human intelligence.
Do You like book Alan Turing: The Enigma (2000)?
I enjoyed this very much. It's described as a "new kind of biography", apparently because of its focus on the mathematics behind Turing's work -- but if this is the new kind, I would hate to read the old kind about Alan Turing, for whom mathematics was so much a part of his life. Andrew Hodges writes with easy strength about everything from Turing's housekeeping habits (poor) to the details of his most well-known paper, which arguably kick-started the field of computer science. Despite Hodges' obvious admiration of and respect for his subject, he nonetheless conveys Alan as a real person, brilliant but human -- which must have been quite a difficult thing to do, thirty years after the fact. I'm very thankful that Hodges could write about one of my heroes in a way that was so accessible to me. But the book falls a little flat when its author starts to ruminate on Alan Turing's death.It's well-known that Turing died young and suddenly, in what is almost universally agreed was a suicide. But if it was a suicide, it was completely unexpected to many: he left no note, had not taken great pains to put his affairs in order, and nobody recalled any changes in his personality immediately prior to the event. Still, depression is a messy business, and one can easily imagine Alan making a spur-of-the-moment decision. But the lack of closure begs for an explanation, and Hodges feels compelled to provide one: the last hundred pages of the book are a re-analysis of Turing's life in the light of attitudes to homosexuality in 1950s Britain, with references to the world stage and in particular the growing power of America. All very interesting stuff, but it's not about Turing, per se. More importantly, it seems very speculative. Was Turing affected by societal attitudes to his sexuality? No doubt. Did that lead to his suicide? Well, perhaps, and in another context I'd probably love to read an essay on the topic, but tacked on to the end of a biography about Turing, it seems a little opportunistic.
—Nicholas
I am really glad I read this book. I read it for the story of the person - the biography. The writing was well done. It is hard to write a story that contains a lot of technical detail. This was managed quite well. My problem was that I couldn't relate to the technical stuff in audio form. I have resigned myself to the fact that for me, technical stuff has to be presented in a visual form. I simply can't handle techical material in audio form while commuting to work. Also, I don't really have the background for understanding all the detail. However, it was rather clearly presented and I could follow along. I confess that I rather zoned out some of those parts and therefore gave a lower rating. Knowing that I was completely mesmerised by the Ramanujan story in "The Man Who Knew Infinity", which I read in print, I might well give this a higher rating if I had read an ebook or paperback.All in all, it was nice to get an in-depth peek at this person before I see what Hollywood makes of him in "The Imitation Game". I already have my suspicions of how the film will be lacking. It might well be a good film, but won't be able to convey the details about his upbringing, the times he lived in, and so on, and which shaped him in so many ways, for better and for worse. I do wonder how Alan Turing would have turned out if he had been born in 1962 instead of 1912. He seemed to have been very much his own person despite the way society was constructed in his day. Today, that independence might have been given much more support, and of course, his lifestyle would have been supported. How would he have developed and would he have lived a much longer life?I am about to write something that I do not think is a spoiler. This is a biography, and if you are at all curious about the book, you should know a bit about his death.As I read about his death, I thought the author was leaning toward accidental death. He even seemed to build a case for an accident. Then he goes the other way and indicates all the ways in which there was no support for Alan in the world in which he lived. Before reading this book, I only knew that he had committed suicide. Period. However, I am left in a bit of confusion. I now have the impression that an accident seems to be the most logical conclusion. True, conditions for living as a homosexual in his day were close to impossible, but they didn't appear to be causing him to think of killing himself from the tales given here. All along, I get the impression of an inquisitive mind who explores in all directions quite eagerly. He could have easily gotten careless and had an accident. A suicide is tragic. An accidental death is also tragic. This was obviously a great mind who achieved great things in his lifetime. I am glad I got a little glimpse into it through this one author's interpretation.A recent newspaper article gives me the impression a new biography is coming out soon. I remember hearing about it because that author said that the idea of Turing having autism is hogwash. Well, this author gave me the strong impression that Turing could have had Asperger's. And so what. It's neither here nor there, but it does clarify his behaviour in some social settings. That's all. It's nothing to be ashamed of, but the article (I cannot remember where I saw it) indicated that this other author felt negative about the idea.I can see that this is a rambling review, but hey, it's a biography. I can share my reactions to the book in a rambling way if I want to! :)
—Karen Mardahl
I watched The Imitation Game last week and I was left in awe, and slightly ashamed of myself for not knowing the contribution of Alan Turing to the war efforts and the advent of the computer age. After the film i bought this book and a few others in order to get to know more about the brilliant man and the code-breaking that went on during WW2. This is an extremely well-written and detailed book, and while a little heavy of the maths side there is nothing not to be expected from a biography about a genius mathematician.
—Michael
