The other day I stumbled across a petition asking that the British government apologize to Alan Turing for “the tragic consequences of prejudice that ended [his] life and career,” and formally acknowledge the significance of his work.
Here’s some background. Alan Turing is most readily associated with the Turing Test, which sought to demonstrate whether a machine could think. The test, basically, involves a text-based conversation a human conducts with another human and with a machine. If he can’t tell whether he’s conversing with a human or computer, the machine passes the test.
The 1950s paper in which Turing laid out the test, and the conception of intelligence that it embodied, became one of the most influential in philosophical literature. It is still essential to most philosophical discussion of artificial intelligence and the essence of human consciousness.
Even more significantly, Turing was a codebreaker during the Second World War, ultimately devising a machine that could decipher the Germans’ Enigma Code. The Enigma Machine was so useful that some historians claim the information it intercepted hastened the end of the war by as much as two years.
Turing was also gay, a crime for which he was criminally prosecuted and chemically castrated. The conviction ended his career, and at the age of 41 he committed suicide.
