Alan Turing (1912-1954) -- inventor of all of this...
- $: life -p Turing -v
- 1912: Alan Mathison Turing born in Paddington, London, England.
- 1926-31: Attended Sherborne School where he discovered that he had a talent for mathematics and fell in love with Christopher Morcom, a fellow student.
- 1930: Death of Christopher Morcom.
- 1931-35: Attended King's College, Cambridge where he studied mathematics, logic and quantum mechanics.
- 1936: Proved the possibility of a universal machine, one that could mimic any other possible machine and which is now known as a computer.
- 1939-1942: Led a top-secret team that worked on and succeeded in cracking the German Enigma military code, building special purpose computing machinery as part of the solution.
- 1945-1948: Worked on building general purpose, stored-program computing machines.
- 1950: Published "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" arguing for the possibility of and best method for detection of Artificial Intelligence.
- 1952: Arrested on suspicion of homosexuality, a crime in the UK at the time.
- 1954: Committed suicide by eating a poisoned apple, rather than go through hormone "treatments" intended to reverse sexual preferences, but resulting instead in the dulling of his otherwise sharp mind.
- >_
- $: quote -a Turing -n 3
- 1936: "It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence."
- 1939: "Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity. The activity of the intuition consists in making spontaneous judgements which are not the result of conscious trains of reasoning. The exercise of ingenuity in mathematics consists in aiding the intuition through suitable arrangements of propositions, and perhaps geometrical figures or drawings."
- 1950: "I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted."
- >_
Find out more about Alan Turing's contributions in this article from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Or watch the movie The initiation Game for a well-told account of Turing's life and work.