He was born the father of modern computing a hundred years ago
Alan Turing, a British mathematical genius who broke secret Nazi codes during World War II, was born 100 years ago.
Turing was born in London on June 1912, 23. On the 100th anniversary of his birth, several cities pay tribute with conferences and exhibitions to the scientist revered as Einstein of mathematics, who was persecuted in his life for his homosexuality.
"Turing is undoubtedly the only one who changed the face of the world in all three of the most complex types of intelligence - human and artificial intelligence, as well as military intelligence," he wrote in a recently published editorial in the British scientific journal Nature.
Turing laid the foundations of modern computing, set the criteria for artificial intelligence, cracked the secret codes of the German army, which some say saved the lives of millions and shortened the war.
In 1936, Turing, who had previously announced that he wanted to "build a brain", published an article in which he described the "universal Turing machine". He was the first who wanted to give programs to the machine in the form of "data" so that it could perform several tasks at the same time, just like today's computer. When it was finally built in 1950 based on his plans, Turing's Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) was the fastest computer in the world.
"The invention of the computer is such a huge achievement that it may seem strange to look for a greater merit. However, I suppose that his contribution to breaking the Nazi codes had a much greater influence on the world," said Jack Copeland, a mathematics expert and the author of several books on Turing.
The general public knows the name of Turing best from the fact that he and his colleagues managed to crack the code of the Enigma machine used to communicate with German submarines cruising in the North Atlantic. According to some scholars, this hastened the fall of Hitler. After the war, Turing dealt with artificial intelligence, for which he also defined the logical criteria that are still valid today, his simulation game to test machine intelligence, the Turing test, is still used today.
He loved biology passionately, he used his mathematical talent in the field of morphogenesis, he tried to decipher how certain types of forms are formed in the animal and plant world, for example the stripes of the zebra or the spots of the cow - the theory of these still preoccupies researchers today. Turing died of cyanide poisoning in 1954, at the age of 41, after his homosexuality, which was still persecuted in Britain at the time, was condemned in 1952 for "violation of good morals" and forced to undergo medical castration. Some believe that Turing, known for his eccentricities, committed suicide with a poisoned apple, but this has never been officially confirmed. In any case, his monument near the University of Manchester depicts him sitting on a bench with an apple in his hand.
Source: MTI
