Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm far A Dowdy and I'm Deblina chokoate boarding, and today we're going to be talking about Alan Turing. And he's considered the father of computer science, the father of artificial intelligence, and also one of the most important wartime code breakers in World War Two. So quite a resume just right off the bat there, and for listeners with a more literary bent, he's also been called the Shelley of science, which is a name I kind of took a shine to you. Yeah, and others have too. He's been a really popular podcast suggestion, though his resumes focus on math and technology has always kind of scared us off a little bit. I think, I mean things like number theory, probability, computer programs, stung our usual subject matter stuff. I'm I'm honestly a little scared to get into too deeply. But fortunately some of his work really transcends the arcane. It's it's understandable if you put some effort into it. And there's a wealth of biographical materials to which I feel like the last few podcasts I've done that has not been the case, So it was a little it was a little refreshing really to research Alan Turning and know that there's so much out there about this man. There are m I T lectures, there's a digital archive at Alan Turing dot net. Their articles in just about every science journal you can name, and there's a house Stuff Works podcast. Yeah, Jonathan and Chris talked about Turin's life less fall on tech stuff and so that's a great place to turn if you want to a little more of an in depth discussion on programming. Yeah, specifically, I was glad though that even they admitted that the math was kind of tricky to discuss. It's just so high level. But they do really do a good job covering the programming and in that side of Turning story. But it's also June, which is Pride Month, and that's why we've picked Turing for today's topic. He's a great, if tragic example of a remarkable man, really a genius whose life was so clearly defined by his homosexuality and reminded me a lot of Oscar Wilde, who Katie and I covered last year for Pride Month. He was another man who was really destroyed by prejudice at the absolute height of his achievement. So it's a great story to learn about, and it's it's good to know about Turing's achievements, but it is also a really, really sad story. Yeah it is. But before we get to that, we're going to start sort of with the beginnings of his life. Alan Mathieson Turing was born June nine, twelve in London to a member of the Indian civil service. His father actually served in the Madrass presidency and his mother's father was the chief engineer of the Madrass railways. But Turning didn't grow up in India. Instead, his parents had the kids fostered in British homes, which, as you can imagine, was pretty lonely, and his parents didn't even come back to England until nine. Yeah, not until his dad retired. So he spent prep school trying to do as much science and math as he could get away with, which at the time it wasn't really the agenda. I guess he would be an outstanding student these days, but his skepticism and his curiosity also sometimes got him in trouble with with the authority figures at school. But in nineteen twenty eight, he had his first experience of true intellectual stimulation. He made friends with a boy who was one year ahead of him, Christopher more Cum and Jonathan and Chris. The way they explained this, I really liked it the way they explained the friendship. Essentially, the two kids could bounce ideas off of each other and combine what they knew and really come away from it with a deeper understanding. So sort of a friendship of two minds that was really influential in the young Turing's life. Yeah. So when Marcum died suddenly in nineteen third, the teenage Churing was left wondering what happened to Markham's consciousness. He was pretty devastated and and wanted to explore that idea further. So for three years he wrote letters to Markham's mother trying to figure out the relationship between mind and matter. And that's a quest that would later define his work and artificial intelligence, which you're going to talk about a little more in a few minutes. Yeah, I will definitely be talking about that. But in October nine, so well, he's really in the middle of his grief in and this new look into the relationship between mind and matter. He goes off to college King's College, Cambridge, and of course he studies math, and it was really a different inspiring environment for him to one where he could think creatively. He could study things like philosophy and economics and surround himself by intelligent people, and also recognized his own sexuality, and he socialized with some of the anti war intellectual circle. But his politics weren't really sharply defined during this period. His in recreation was athletic. He liked running and rowing and failing, and of course doing math. Yeah, by nineteen thirty four he had received a distinguished degree, and by nineteen thirty five, at age twenty two, he got a fellowship to King's College. So well on this intellectual path of his. But it was in nineteen thirty five that Turing started tackling and intriguing mathematical question, and that's the question of decidability. And during that process he envisions a machine that could complete computational operations just like the human brain. The Turing machine at that point was purely theoretical, but it could perform any kind of operation that was programmed to do play chess, calculate numbers, anything like that, and that idea develops into the idea of a universal Turing machine which could handle any task, and individual touring machine could. So, for example, if the Turing machine is the early computer program, the universal machine would be the early computer. The one machine that can do any task is programmed to do. Yeah. And a guy named b Jack Copeland described the significance of this creation in an M I. T. Lecture. And it really helped me understand how important it was because it might seem a little old hat if you if you just look at it like a computer or computer program, he said. Nowadays, when nearly everyone owns the physical realization of a universal turning machine, Turing's idea of a one stop shop computing machine is apt to seem as obvious as the wheel. But in nineteen thirty six, engineers thought in terms of building specific machines for particular purposes. So this was really a revolutionary idea at the time, and of course some people realized that, but not everyone knew the full implications of of what this idea would eventually come to. Yeah, And it would be more than a decade before the physical realization of a turning machine was actually built. Until then, Touring continuing continued his studies at Princeton and then returned to England and Cambridge before the outbreak of World War two, and then on the first full day of the war he joined the Government Code and Cipher School, whose headquarters were at the now famous Bletchley Park in London. Yeah, and the g CCS was busy bringing together all of the country's top minds at this point, so mathematicians like Touring, but also chess players and egyptologists, all sorts of smart people with different kinds of skills, anyone who they hoped might lend insight into breaking German codes, which was what they were all about in the chief Code at the time. The one that was really giving them the most trouble was the Enigma, and Polish Cryptanalysis had been working on the Enigma for a really long time since nineteen thirty two, and they had created a code breaking machine called the Bomba a few years after that, but by nineteen thirty nine, Touring and others were helping to create a new machine, one that could adapt to the Enigma because it got to where the Germans were changing the codes every twenty four hours pretty much. So he helped develop a new machine called the Bomb, which could DECIPHERLOFBAFA Enigma communications. There's a really neat British Heritage article by Gene Paskey about Bletchley Park, which I recommend if you just sort of want to get a picture of it. We were actually talking about this might be a good episode in itself, but I hope we don't give too much away. It nicely describes rooms full of these machines and the operators who maintain them. And in case you think that they're little, tiny devices like we're used to today, little electronic devices, they're not in any sense like that. They are large mechanical machines that required a lot of upkeep. They had to be kept clean, um they were They took up the room essentially. So these really big machines. They helped crack the Air Force Enigma, but the German naval Enigma was kind of a tougher nut to crack and also critical for winning the Battle of the Atlantic. So Turing had worked out part of the code in nineteen thirty nine, but the big break in the situation came courtesy of a Royal Navy when they captured an Enigma machine and code book from a U boat, so by June one U boat traffic was decipherable. Yeah, they have cracked the code, and by early nineteen forty two, Bletchley Park was decoding thirty nine thousand German transmissions a month, and of course some of those were complaints about the underwear splitting down the middle is in that type of thing, but also some really serious communications in there. It rose to an eventual eighty four thousand transmissions a month, so pretty astonishing figure. And with the nineteen forty three breaking of Germany's high level binary teleprinter code, which was what Hitler himself used, and high members of his government Um Churchill, was able to read Hitler's mail before Hitler could read it. According to Posh's article, something I thought was interesting and something I never knew about Bletchley Park, I mean neither. But it turns out the combined efforts of Bletchley Park shortened the war by two years, and for his part, Turing received the Order of the British Empire, which was one of the most prestigious awards you could get. Yeah, and so after the war he's looking for a new job, and he was recruited to the National Physics laboratory and the task, conveniently enough was to design and build an electronic computer, so essentially a real Turing machine. Seems like just the guy to bring in to do this, And he called his new design the Automatic Computing Engine, which has the lovely acronym ACE. But it made a good computer, uh, and it was a really ambitious advanced design it. If it had been built, it would have had the memory capacity of an early MAX So that's pretty astounding if you consider this immediately after a World War two. Yeah, but things moved more slowly than they had at Bletchley Park. There was lots of red tape to deal with, and Turing's colleagues thought that the original ACE design was too much and opted for a smaller machine, which was called the Pilot Model ACE. So part of the problem here was that Turing's wartime achievements were unrecognized due to their secrecy. Yeah, he couldn't go out and say, well, guys, at Bletchley Park, I did this. I mean, he couldn't talk about any of that stuff. Yeah, he couldn't brag on himself. So to relieve the frustration and the stress of the situation, he started long distance running and it took an injury actually to prevent him from qualifying for the ninety eight Olympic marathon team. So he was pretty good at it. It's really good at it. It's it's one of those I don't know, it's like a cherry on top for somebody with so many talents that they would also be an amazing athlete. Well, I was going to say, it's almost not fair, but you're kinder than I am, obviously. Yeah, well, whatever way you look at it. But by this point, delays meant that the National Physics Laboratory wasn't going to be the first place that built the first working electronics stored program digital computer. That honor went to Manchester University and it happened in June. So Turing obviously frustrated by his his time at the National Physics Laboratory, and they got beat out. Yeah, they got beat out. He wasn't really listened to his achievements, and accomplishments weren't really appreciated to the the level they deserved to be. So he went to work in Manchester, oddly enough as the deputy director, even though there was no director of the program. Kind of a strange little detail there. Yeah, but he designed the programming system of the Ferronti Mark one, the first commercially available digital electronic computer, so hopefully that was a little solace for him. Consolation program yeah. Um. And it was also during his time at Manchester that Turing started to hypothesize about what would later be known as artificial intelligence, and and I thought it was it was interesting, and this is something that's kind of, I guess, difficult for me to talk about with my limited knowledge of computer programming and science. I just work on a computer. I don't know what happens inside. But I was impressed that, Um, even though he had he had the skill to work on developing this field, he put the machine to use right away. So I'm sure he was still considering about how it could be advanced. But he started looking for ways to use the Ferronti Mark one, which I thought was was pretty neat. Yeah. It kind of went back to his old interest in the connection between mind and matter, and in nineteen fifty Touring wrote a paper called Computing, Machinery and Intelligence in the journal Mind. In it, he proposed something called an imitation test. Today that's called the Turing test, and the test basically provided a way to judge the intelligence of a machine without bias. So an interrogator, for example, would sit in an isolated room from two subjects, one a person, one a machine, and the interrogator would ask them both questions, and if the interrogator couldn't tell who was who, then that meant the machine was thinking. Yeah, it had intelligence in some definable way. And Turing even predicted he had a lot of confidence in computers. He predicted that by the year two thousand, a computer would be so good at this game this, this Turing test, an interrogator would not have more than a seventy percent chance of correctly identifying who is who after five minutes. And that is a very ambitious goal because according to Encyclopedia Britannica, no computer today has even come close to that standard. But Turing really he did have a lot of hopes for computers. Yeah. He also hypothesized that one day, quote, ladies would take their computers for walks in the park and tell each other, my little computer said such a funny thing in the morning. I think we're a little closer to that one than the seventy percent goal. Maybe I don't know. I still like my doggy though. Yeah. So Turing continued to study artificial intelligence, but also stuff like biological growth with the FRONTI Mark one I said that he really did put that sheen too good youth, and his career was expanding into these different subject areas and his recognition was also growing. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in March nineteen fifty one. That's another really prestigious honor. He was appointed to Readership in the Theory of Computing at Manchester, which sounds like a very modern title. But in nineteen fifty two things took a turn for the worse in his life after a break in in his Manchester home and he told the police that he thought the burglar was probably connected to a man he was quote having an affair with, and he had been pretty open about his sexuality since college. During his Bletchley Park days, he had proposed to a colleague, Joan Clark, but broke it off. He told her that he was gay and couldn't marry her. But being so frank with the police in this way was really dangerous because at the time homosexuality was a felony in Great Britain, and so Turing was tried and convicted of growth indecency, and he was faced with a really terrible choice. Yeah. His two choices were prison or hormone injections of estrogen, so chemical sterilization. Yeah, and he chose the latter and also lost his security clearance as a result, So no government codes, no government computers. And on June seven, nineteen fifty four, he was found dead by his housekeeper with a partially eaten cyanide laced apple by his side. Now, some have theorized that he was assassinated as a security risk, but it's pretty much widely accepted nowadays that Turing committed suicide, and even then right, and it's also accepted that Turing did kill himself in in this particular way so that it would allow his mother to interpret the situation as an accident, since he'd been working with cyanide and other chemicals in his work, so she thought that he had some cyanide on his hand and he ate an apple and accidentally poisoned himself. But assuming he did commit suicide, which is what most people have feel, it's a really tragic end to to this great life. And and at the heels of this terrible prosecution. So in two thousand nine, Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a formal apology for the British Government's treatment of Touring, and I'm going to read just part of it. He said, Touring truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution it helped to turn the tide of war. The dead of gratitude he has owed makes it all the more horrifying. Therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely on the behalf of the British government and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work, I'm very proud to say we're sorry. You deserve so much better. So two thousand twelve is Alan Turing Year, and a stateside recognition has been long standing. The US Association for Computer Machinery has given out the Touring Award since nineteen sixty six, and if anything, as technology develops in new areas of steady emerge, Alan Turing will probably just become more recognized as the year's go on. Yeah, if you think about how many career descriptions that apply to his name, you know, father of artificial intelligence, that sort of thing that didn't exist when he was alive. We can only imagine that more will be added over the years as science and technology advances. And we have a lot of information about this kind of stuff on our site, which we will tell you more about at the end. But if you have anything to contribute on this topic, you know anything else about Turion's research, or maybe an anecdote about his life that we missed, please write us at History Podcast at how staff works dot com. You can also look us up on Twitter at mist in history or on Facebook. And before we wrap up, we thought it would be a good time to do a little listener mail that has to do also with a Battle of the Atlantic. We have a letter here from Kate and she says, I just finished listening to the sync the Bismarck podcast and wanted to share my own tidbit from the story of the German battleship. Following the battle, the h MS Cossack recovered floating on a board a black and white cat from the Bismarck, renamed Oscar and later unsinkable Sam. The cat went on to serve on three Royal British Navy ships, surviving two more shipwrecks. He was then retired from active duty and lived in officers quarters in Gibraltar before being shipped to England, where he lived the rest of his days. And she gives us a link to a Wikipedia article that has a portrait of Sam here. So thanks for that, Kate. That's a very interesting tidbit. I looked at the picture. He's the super cute cat. We always love pet stories here at History that podcast. Yes, we're then us your pet stories, especially they're historical because then they can turn into podcasts every now and then, So send us your email at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. And again, we also do have so many tech articles. You can find them by visiting our website and just going right to the tech tab and looking from there you'll find tons of stuff that interest you if you are in to computer science or programming, or math or or anything like that. All of it is on our website at www dot how staff works dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how staff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The House Stuff Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it today on iTunes.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm far A Dowdy and I'm Deblina chokoate boarding, and today we're going to be talking about Alan Turing. And he's considered the father of computer science, the father of artificial intelligence, and also one of the most important wartime code breakers in World War Two. So quite a resume just right off the bat there, and for listeners with a more literary bent, he's also been called the Shelley of science, which is a name I kind of took a shine to you. Yeah, and others have too. He's been a really popular podcast suggestion, though his resumes focus on math and technology has always kind of scared us off a little bit. I think, I mean things like number theory, probability, computer programs, stung our usual subject matter stuff. I'm I'm honestly a little scared to get into too deeply. But fortunately some of his work really transcends the arcane. It's it's understandable if you put some effort into it. And there's a wealth of biographical materials to which I feel like the last few podcasts I've done that has not been the case, So it was a little it was a little refreshing really to research Alan Turning and know that there's so much out there about this man. There are m I T lectures, there's a digital archive at Alan Turing dot net. Their articles in just about every science journal you can name, and there's a house Stuff Works podcast. Yeah, Jonathan and Chris talked about Turin's life less fall on tech stuff and so that's a great place to turn if you want to a little more of an in depth discussion on programming. Yeah, specifically, I was glad though that even they admitted that the math was kind of tricky to discuss. It's just so high level. But they do really do a good job covering the programming and in that side of Turning story. But it's also June, which is Pride Month, and that's why we've picked Turing for today's topic. He's a great, if tragic example of a remarkable man, really a genius whose life was so clearly defined by his homosexuality and reminded me a lot of Oscar Wilde, who Katie and I covered last year for Pride Month. He was another man who was really destroyed by prejudice at the absolute height of his achievement. So it's a great story to learn about, and it's it's good to know about Turing's achievements, but it is also a really, really sad story. Yeah it is. But before we get to that, we're going to start sort of with the beginnings of his life. Alan Mathieson Turing was born June nine, twelve in London to a member of the Indian civil service. His father actually served in the Madrass presidency and his mother's father was the chief engineer of the Madrass railways. But Turning didn't grow up in India. Instead, his parents had the kids fostered in British homes, which, as you can imagine, was pretty lonely, and his parents didn't even come back to England until nine. Yeah, not until his dad retired. So he spent prep school trying to do as much science and math as he could get away with, which at the time it wasn't really the agenda. I guess he would be an outstanding student these days, but his skepticism and his curiosity also sometimes got him in trouble with with the authority figures at school. But in nineteen twenty eight, he had his first experience of true intellectual stimulation. He made friends with a boy who was one year ahead of him, Christopher more Cum and Jonathan and Chris. The way they explained this, I really liked it the way they explained the friendship. Essentially, the two kids could bounce ideas off of each other and combine what they knew and really come away from it with a deeper understanding. So sort of a friendship of two minds that was really influential in the young Turing's life. Yeah. So when Marcum died suddenly in nineteen third, the teenage Churing was left wondering what happened to Markham's consciousness. He was pretty devastated and and wanted to explore that idea further. So for three years he wrote letters to Markham's mother trying to figure out the relationship between mind and matter. And that's a quest that would later define his work and artificial intelligence, which you're going to talk about a little more in a few minutes. Yeah, I will definitely be talking about that. But in October nine, so well, he's really in the middle of his grief in and this new look into the relationship between mind and matter. He goes off to college King's College, Cambridge, and of course he studies math, and it was really a different inspiring environment for him to one where he could think creatively. He could study things like philosophy and economics and surround himself by intelligent people, and also recognized his own sexuality, and he socialized with some of the anti war intellectual circle. But his politics weren't really sharply defined during this period. His in recreation was athletic. He liked running and rowing and failing, and of course doing math. Yeah, by nineteen thirty four he had received a distinguished degree, and by nineteen thirty five, at age twenty two, he got a fellowship to King's College. So well on this intellectual path of his. But it was in nineteen thirty five that Turing started tackling and intriguing mathematical question, and that's the question of decidability. And during that process he envisions a machine that could complete computational operations just like the human brain. The Turing machine at that point was purely theoretical, but it could perform any kind of operation that was programmed to do play chess, calculate numbers, anything like that, and that idea develops into the idea of a universal Turing machine which could handle any task, and individual touring machine could. So, for example, if the Turing machine is the early computer program, the universal machine would be the early computer. The one machine that can do any task is programmed to do. Yeah. And a guy named b Jack Copeland described the significance of this creation in an M I. T. Lecture. And it really helped me understand how important it was because it might seem a little old hat if you if you just look at it like a computer or computer program, he said. Nowadays, when nearly everyone owns the physical realization of a universal turning machine, Turing's idea of a one stop shop computing machine is apt to seem as obvious as the wheel. But in nineteen thirty six, engineers thought in terms of building specific machines for particular purposes. So this was really a revolutionary idea at the time, and of course some people realized that, but not everyone knew the full implications of of what this idea would eventually come to. Yeah, And it would be more than a decade before the physical realization of a turning machine was actually built. Until then, Touring continuing continued his studies at Princeton and then returned to England and Cambridge before the outbreak of World War two, and then on the first full day of the war he joined the Government Code and Cipher School, whose headquarters were at the now famous Bletchley Park in London. Yeah, and the g CCS was busy bringing together all of the country's top minds at this point, so mathematicians like Touring, but also chess players and egyptologists, all sorts of smart people with different kinds of skills, anyone who they hoped might lend insight into breaking German codes, which was what they were all about in the chief Code at the time. The one that was really giving them the most trouble was the Enigma, and Polish Cryptanalysis had been working on the Enigma for a really long time since nineteen thirty two, and they had created a code breaking machine called the Bomba a few years after that, but by nineteen thirty nine, Touring and others were helping to create a new machine, one that could adapt to the Enigma because it got to where the Germans were changing the codes every twenty four hours pretty much. So he helped develop a new machine called the Bomb, which could DECIPHERLOFBAFA Enigma communications. There's a really neat British Heritage article by Gene Paskey about Bletchley Park, which I recommend if you just sort of want to get a picture of it. We were actually talking about this might be a good episode in itself, but I hope we don't give too much away. It nicely describes rooms full of these machines and the operators who maintain them. And in case you think that they're little, tiny devices like we're used to today, little electronic devices, they're not in any sense like that. They are large mechanical machines that required a lot of upkeep. They had to be kept clean, um they were They took up the room essentially. So these really big machines. They helped crack the Air Force Enigma, but the German naval Enigma was kind of a tougher nut to crack and also critical for winning the Battle of the Atlantic. So Turing had worked out part of the code in nineteen thirty nine, but the big break in the situation came courtesy of a Royal Navy when they captured an Enigma machine and code book from a U boat, so by June one U boat traffic was decipherable. Yeah, they have cracked the code, and by early nineteen forty two, Bletchley Park was decoding thirty nine thousand German transmissions a month, and of course some of those were complaints about the underwear splitting down the middle is in that type of thing, but also some really serious communications in there. It rose to an eventual eighty four thousand transmissions a month, so pretty astonishing figure. And with the nineteen forty three breaking of Germany's high level binary teleprinter code, which was what Hitler himself used, and high members of his government Um Churchill, was able to read Hitler's mail before Hitler could read it. According to Posh's article, something I thought was interesting and something I never knew about Bletchley Park, I mean neither. But it turns out the combined efforts of Bletchley Park shortened the war by two years, and for his part, Turing received the Order of the British Empire, which was one of the most prestigious awards you could get. Yeah, and so after the war he's looking for a new job, and he was recruited to the National Physics laboratory and the task, conveniently enough was to design and build an electronic computer, so essentially a real Turing machine. Seems like just the guy to bring in to do this, And he called his new design the Automatic Computing Engine, which has the lovely acronym ACE. But it made a good computer, uh, and it was a really ambitious advanced design it. If it had been built, it would have had the memory capacity of an early MAX So that's pretty astounding if you consider this immediately after a World War two. Yeah, but things moved more slowly than they had at Bletchley Park. There was lots of red tape to deal with, and Turing's colleagues thought that the original ACE design was too much and opted for a smaller machine, which was called the Pilot Model ACE. So part of the problem here was that Turing's wartime achievements were unrecognized due to their secrecy. Yeah, he couldn't go out and say, well, guys, at Bletchley Park, I did this. I mean, he couldn't talk about any of that stuff. Yeah, he couldn't brag on himself. So to relieve the frustration and the stress of the situation, he started long distance running and it took an injury actually to prevent him from qualifying for the ninety eight Olympic marathon team. So he was pretty good at it. It's really good at it. It's it's one of those I don't know, it's like a cherry on top for somebody with so many talents that they would also be an amazing athlete. Well, I was going to say, it's almost not fair, but you're kinder than I am, obviously. Yeah, well, whatever way you look at it. But by this point, delays meant that the National Physics Laboratory wasn't going to be the first place that built the first working electronics stored program digital computer. That honor went to Manchester University and it happened in June. So Turing obviously frustrated by his his time at the National Physics Laboratory, and they got beat out. Yeah, they got beat out. He wasn't really listened to his achievements, and accomplishments weren't really appreciated to the the level they deserved to be. So he went to work in Manchester, oddly enough as the deputy director, even though there was no director of the program. Kind of a strange little detail there. Yeah, but he designed the programming system of the Ferronti Mark one, the first commercially available digital electronic computer, so hopefully that was a little solace for him. Consolation program yeah. Um. And it was also during his time at Manchester that Turing started to hypothesize about what would later be known as artificial intelligence, and and I thought it was it was interesting, and this is something that's kind of, I guess, difficult for me to talk about with my limited knowledge of computer programming and science. I just work on a computer. I don't know what happens inside. But I was impressed that, Um, even though he had he had the skill to work on developing this field, he put the machine to use right away. So I'm sure he was still considering about how it could be advanced. But he started looking for ways to use the Ferronti Mark one, which I thought was was pretty neat. Yeah. It kind of went back to his old interest in the connection between mind and matter, and in nineteen fifty Touring wrote a paper called Computing, Machinery and Intelligence in the journal Mind. In it, he proposed something called an imitation test. Today that's called the Turing test, and the test basically provided a way to judge the intelligence of a machine without bias. So an interrogator, for example, would sit in an isolated room from two subjects, one a person, one a machine, and the interrogator would ask them both questions, and if the interrogator couldn't tell who was who, then that meant the machine was thinking. Yeah, it had intelligence in some definable way. And Turing even predicted he had a lot of confidence in computers. He predicted that by the year two thousand, a computer would be so good at this game this, this Turing test, an interrogator would not have more than a seventy percent chance of correctly identifying who is who after five minutes. And that is a very ambitious goal because according to Encyclopedia Britannica, no computer today has even come close to that standard. But Turing really he did have a lot of hopes for computers. Yeah. He also hypothesized that one day, quote, ladies would take their computers for walks in the park and tell each other, my little computer said such a funny thing in the morning. I think we're a little closer to that one than the seventy percent goal. Maybe I don't know. I still like my doggy though. Yeah. So Turing continued to study artificial intelligence, but also stuff like biological growth with the FRONTI Mark one I said that he really did put that sheen too good youth, and his career was expanding into these different subject areas and his recognition was also growing. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in March nineteen fifty one. That's another really prestigious honor. He was appointed to Readership in the Theory of Computing at Manchester, which sounds like a very modern title. But in nineteen fifty two things took a turn for the worse in his life after a break in in his Manchester home and he told the police that he thought the burglar was probably connected to a man he was quote having an affair with, and he had been pretty open about his sexuality since college. During his Bletchley Park days, he had proposed to a colleague, Joan Clark, but broke it off. He told her that he was gay and couldn't marry her. But being so frank with the police in this way was really dangerous because at the time homosexuality was a felony in Great Britain, and so Turing was tried and convicted of growth indecency, and he was faced with a really terrible choice. Yeah. His two choices were prison or hormone injections of estrogen, so chemical sterilization. Yeah, and he chose the latter and also lost his security clearance as a result, So no government codes, no government computers. And on June seven, nineteen fifty four, he was found dead by his housekeeper with a partially eaten cyanide laced apple by his side. Now, some have theorized that he was assassinated as a security risk, but it's pretty much widely accepted nowadays that Turing committed suicide, and even then right, and it's also accepted that Turing did kill himself in in this particular way so that it would allow his mother to interpret the situation as an accident, since he'd been working with cyanide and other chemicals in his work, so she thought that he had some cyanide on his hand and he ate an apple and accidentally poisoned himself. But assuming he did commit suicide, which is what most people have feel, it's a really tragic end to to this great life. And and at the heels of this terrible prosecution. So in two thousand nine, Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a formal apology for the British Government's treatment of Touring, and I'm going to read just part of it. He said, Touring truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution it helped to turn the tide of war. The dead of gratitude he has owed makes it all the more horrifying. Therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely on the behalf of the British government and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work, I'm very proud to say we're sorry. You deserve so much better. So two thousand twelve is Alan Turing Year, and a stateside recognition has been long standing. The US Association for Computer Machinery has given out the Touring Award since nineteen sixty six, and if anything, as technology develops in new areas of steady emerge, Alan Turing will probably just become more recognized as the year's go on. Yeah, if you think about how many career descriptions that apply to his name, you know, father of artificial intelligence, that sort of thing that didn't exist when he was alive. We can only imagine that more will be added over the years as science and technology advances. And we have a lot of information about this kind of stuff on our site, which we will tell you more about at the end. But if you have anything to contribute on this topic, you know anything else about Turion's research, or maybe an anecdote about his life that we missed, please write us at History Podcast at how staff works dot com. You can also look us up on Twitter at mist in history or on Facebook. And before we wrap up, we thought it would be a good time to do a little listener mail that has to do also with a Battle of the Atlantic. We have a letter here from Kate and she says, I just finished listening to the sync the Bismarck podcast and wanted to share my own tidbit from the story of the German battleship. Following the battle, the h MS Cossack recovered floating on a board a black and white cat from the Bismarck, renamed Oscar and later unsinkable Sam. The cat went on to serve on three Royal British Navy ships, surviving two more shipwrecks. He was then retired from active duty and lived in officers quarters in Gibraltar before being shipped to England, where he lived the rest of his days. And she gives us a link to a Wikipedia article that has a portrait of Sam here. So thanks for that, Kate. That's a very interesting tidbit. I looked at the picture. He's the super cute cat. We always love pet stories here at History that podcast. Yes, we're then us your pet stories, especially they're historical because then they can turn into podcasts every now and then, So send us your email at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. And again, we also do have so many tech articles. You can find them by visiting our website and just going right to the tech tab and looking from there you'll find tons of stuff that interest you if you are in to computer science or programming, or math or or anything like that. All of it is on our website at www dot how staff works dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how staff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The House Stuff Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it today on iTunes.