A new movie based on the life of Alan Turing, "The Imitation Game", was released this week in the United States. The film, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in August, is the perfect reason to look back at the amazing career of Turing, and the legacy he left behind.
The film looks at Turing's work as a code breaker during World War II. Turing most memorably cracked the German code called Enigma. Historians believed that by cracking that code, Turing may have shaved two years off of the war.
The "Imitation Game" is based on Andrew Hodges's biography of Turing, called "Alan Turing: The Enigma."
However, aside from Turing's contribution to the war effort, he also led to great advances in mathematics and computer programming. One of Turing's first mathematical accomplishments was the Turing machine, which can assign computers a "mood" that tells it to do different things with sets of input data. For example, a calculator can either add or subtract two numbers, depending on what "mood" a user tells it to use.
"The thing that really singles him out is his theoretical work in the 1930s, published at the end of 1936 [in his famous paper On Computable Numbers], in which he brought up this idea of the universal Turing machine. And he said, rather tantalizingly, we can now invent a machine...and that really is the generalized idea of the computer as we now know it," Hodges said.
Turing is also famous for creating the Turing test, a standard used to test computer intelligence compared to human intelligence. An early standard for artificial intelligence was whether it could pass the Turing Test. Turing described this test as an "imitation game." In June of this year, a computer passed the Turing test for the first time in history.
In 1952, Turing, who was gay, was tried and convicted of gross indecency in his home country of England, where homosexual relations between men were illegal. Turing died shortly after that trial, two years later, by poisoning himself with cyanide. Hodges believes his death was a suicide he committed because of anguish over his sexuality.
