So you’ve been a student at Access Labs for the past month. Every morning you start with a few group discussion questions, labs and then a lecture. Right before you enter Turing your attention may have been drawn to the fancy looking portrait on the glass. That man just so happens to be one of the most important figures in all of computing.
Who is Alan Turing?
Alan Mathison Turing was born in London on June 23,1912 and passed June 7, 1954. Turing studied at both Cambridge and Princeton universities. He was already a part-time employee of the British Government’s Code and Cypher School(Bletchley Park)before the start of the Second World War.
Turing laid the groundwork for theoretical computing and artificial intelligence. With his knowledge he provided the world with the unprecedented concepts of algorithms and computation. He is the creator of the Turing machine which can be known as the prototype of the modern-day computer. Oh, and by the way Alan Turing conceptualized all of this without actually seeing a computer.
The Machine That Changed All Machines
Turing was an important leader for German naval cryptanalysis team at Bletchley Park. The main focus of Alan Turing’s work was to solve the ‘Enigma’ code. The ‘Enigma’ code was created using the Enigma Machine; a German electro-mechanical rotor cipher. This machine was developed to protect Nazi Germany’s military/naval communication. The enigma machine introduced models such as the plugboard. This increased the complexity of the cipher, making it nearly impossible to solve.
Pre-war Poland had its own team of engineers and mathematicians that created the ‘Bomba’ machine. This machine was created to find the settings for the ‘Engima’ and cracking its code. The issue was that the Germans created new cyphers daily so their messages could not be intercepted come World War II. Enter Alan Turing.
With Alan Turing in the main seat the ‘impossible’ became old news but not so quickly. Turing along with fellow mathematician Gordon Welchman improved the bomba and created the machine that changed history the ‘Bombe’. Their improved device was monumental in some of the assured victories for the allied forces. Take a look of the battle of the Atlantic its fascinating!
Although it is hard to calculate how much time Turing’s invention saved during the war; studies show that his team shortened the war by at least two years. These efforts saved over fourteen million lives.
Still Not Convinced?
Turing took his efforts beyond the war and changed technology forever when he created the ‘Turing’ Machine. The Turing machine is an idealized computing device that consist of a read and writer head. This device had a paper tape that was divided into squares and each square had a different symbol written on it(expressed as a 7-tuple ‘Q, T, B, ∑, δ, q0, B, F’). The Turing machine functioned somewhat like a scanner but its purpose was to store memory. The Turing machine acted a a vehicle for input and output. As programmers we know that input and output are fundamental pieces for solving a problem.This was the stepping stone for modern-day problem solving. In Turing’s original article “On Computable Numbers, With An Application To The Entscheidungsproblem” he states that he imagines not a mechanical machine but a person who he calls the “computer”. Turing’s has contributed greatly to the development of the very computer you may own! He understood the idea of controlling the function of a computing machine by using memory and storying encoded instructions.These are the very same concepts of modern day computing at a lower level. For more information on Alan Turing take a look at his paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”. In this work he discusses the foundation of artificial intelligence stating that computer may be able to think on their own! Does this sound familiar?
