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Alan Turing. (1912 - 1954). Early Biography. Born on June 23, 1912 in London, England Attended a prestigious public school where he showed promise in math and science but neglected the “classics”
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Alan Turing (1912 - 1954)
Early Biography • Born on June 23, 1912 in London, England • Attended a prestigious public school where he showed promise in math and science but neglected the “classics” • Later attended King's College in Cambridge, his second choice, after failing to get into Trinity College
Turing Machines • Around 1936 Turing developed the concept of a device that could read and manipulate symbols on a strip of tape • Turing used this to address the Entscheidungsproblem,which he found “undecidable” • The concept of a Turing Machine is used as the basis for all computers today • Machines capable of performing all the operations a Turing Machine could theoretically do are said to be “Turing complete”
World War II • Turing headed the code-breaking efforts in England to crack the German “Enigma machine” • Developed a machine that cracked the code by contradiction • Named an “Officer of the Order of the British Empire”
After the War • Turing began work on the Automatic Computing Engine • Devised the Turing Test thought experiment while working on one of the first stored-program computers • Wrote a chess program before there existed any computer capable of running it • Later turned to mathematical biology, specifically the appearance of the Fibonacci sequence in nature
Homosexuality & Death • In 1952 Turing was convicted of being a homosexual • Underwent hormone therapy to avoid going to prison • Two years later he was found dead of an apparent suicide by cyanide poisoning • On September 10, 2009, the British government released an official apology to their treatment of Turing
Bibliography • http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/pages/Reference%20Articles/codebreaker.html • http://www.abelard.org/turpap2/tp2-ie.asp • http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061128093244.htm • http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8249792.stm