Alan Turing Centenary, Part 1

I’ve written here a couple of time about the Alan Turing Centenary, marking the 100th anniversary of of the birth of the English mathematician, cryptanalyst, and pioneer computer scientist; and about some of the events planned for the occasion.  This coming Saturday, June 23, is Turing’s birthday, so there will undoubtedly be more events and tributes to follow.  In this, and subsequent posts, I’ll attempt to highlight some of the more interesting items that I come across.

Although it is not new, one item that deserves to be on the list is the wonderful biography of Turing by Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma.   Hodges also maintains The Alan Turing Home Page, a Web site dedicated to Turing.  It includes a short on-line biography, a scrapbook, and links to documents and publications.

Ars Technica has an article about Turing’s life and work, “The Highly Productive Habits of Alan Turing”, by Matthew Lasar, lecturer in history at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  It gives a good brief overview of Turing’s work, organized under seven “productive habits”:

1. Try to see things as they are.
2. Don’t get sidetracked by ideologies.
3. Be practical.
4. Break big problems down into smaller tasks.
5. Just keep going.
6. Be playful.
7. Remember that it is people who matter.

If you aren’t familiar with Turing at all, this article is a good place to get the highlights quickly.

Wired has a couple of items on Turing.  The first is another brief biographical sketch, in the form of a time line of Turing’s life and work.  It mentions one occasion that I had forgotten: in the early 1950s, Turing wrote a program to play chess.  This was (pace Habit 3 above) not a very practical exercise, since at that time there was no computer powerful enough to run the program.  Turing tested the program by using an emulator — himself — executing the program with pencil and paper.

The second article at Wired is a more subjective look at some of Turing’s accomplishments.  It focuses mostly on his wartime work at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park (also known as Station X), breaking the German’s Enigma encryption system, and on his work in computer science.  It also mentions Turing’s only paper on biology, “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis”, published in 1952.  Oddly, it doesn’t mention one of his best-known works, the essay Computing Machinery and Intelligence, published in October 1950 in the Oxford journal Mind, in which he proposes the “imitation game”, the Turing test of intelligence.

I’ll post additional items as I come across them.