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The Enigma of Turing

Writer's picture: Mishkat BhattacharyaMishkat Bhattacharya

With all the buzz about AI, including two Nobel prizes this year (in physics and chemistry) related to the subject, it was time for me to pick up a book that had been waiting to be read on my shelf since the summer: Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges (736 pages).


First some general observations:


  1. The book has been around for a while - it was first published in 1983.


  1. The Enigma in the title is a pun on the German cipher machine that Turing help break. It also refers to the mysterious character of Turing himself, with reference to both his anti-establishment scientific attitude as well as his homosexuality, which was a criminal offense in England in his time.


  2. The book was the basis for the 2014 movie The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch. (The Imitation Game refers to the Turing test, designed to establish if a machine can display human-like intelligence - sounds familiar?)


  3. Andrew Hodges, the author, is a mathematician at Oxford, and was a doctoral student of Roger Penrose.

5. The book has a foreword by Douglas Hofstadter, the well known author of Godel Escher

and Bach.


What I enjoyed learning from the book:


  1. Given the length of the book (736 pages), I did not expect a superficial treatment. Indeed, Hodges goes into great detail, presenting the times (i.e. the zeitgeist) and the characters as well as original material, such as many of Turing's letters. The book is definitely a very good source for the scholarship on Turing.


  2. Turing had strong connections to India. His father was a magistrate and his maternal grandfather a railway engineer in India during the days of the British Empire. Turing was, the book says, conceived in Chhatrapur, though his mother traveled back to England for her delivery.


  3. Turing's childhood is described very well, with his initial distaste for the school curriculum (esp. Greek), his chaotic penmanship, his average grades, and his lack of any indication of being a genius.


  4. Slowly we begin to see chemistry experiments, sometimes carried out against the ridicule of his classmates, and an ability for science, especially mathematics, emerge. A defining experience is his close - essentially scientific - friendship with Christopher Morcom, who dies in their last year of high school.


  1. Turing then goes to King's College, Cambridge, for his undergraduate degree, where he develops his mathematical chops and his long distance running. This is where he seriously starts thinking about algorithms and computing machines.


  1. He comes to the US and gets a PhD (in one year and nine months) with Church at Princeton. This connection came about as a result of their independently answering, negatively, a question posed by Hilbert about computable functions. Here Turing also comes into contact with Godel, and with von Neumann, who had a high opinion of his work and wrote him recommendation letters.


  1. Turing then goes to Bletchley Park, and helps decode the German cipher machine Enigma, which helps the Allies gain crucial victories in the war.


  1. Later came interactions with Claude Shannon, one of the pioneers of information theory; and Norbert Wiener, the pioneer of cybernetics; and of course, his work on the ACE (Automatic Computing Engine), Turing's analog to von Neumann's ENIAC, one of the world's first digitally programmable digital computers.


  2. The book finishes with an analysis of Turing's personal life and the circumstances of his death, at 41, by suicide.


    Summary


A detailed book, which is certainly of interest to the historian of science. Perhaps a bit long for the popular reader. The discussion of the central theme that occupied Turing, of whether a machine can display human intelligence, is extensive. Turing's character is sympathetically and carefully attended to. I will probably go back to the book to re-read certain parts.




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