Alan Turing Google Doodle: Turing Machine Codebreaker Logo Honors Father of Computer Science

Alan Turing would have celebrated his 100th birthday today. Google honors the life and work of a man whose accomplishments were many; a brilliant academic and codebreaker, Turing is also known amongst computer scientists as the father of artificial intelligence.

Little known in life, his work and its significance for computer science has only become notorious in recent decades. Todays Google Doodle is an interactive HTML5 codebreaking game that simulates the Turing Machine.

At first, the Google logo appears in grayscale. Solving a series of codes turns each letter in the logo to its proper color, with the last code the most difficult to break.

"We thought the most fitting way of paying tribute to Turings incredible life and work would be to simulate the theoretical Turing machine he proposed in a mathematical paper, according to a Google blog post. Visit the homepage today we invite you to try your hand at programming it. If you get it the first time, try again... it gets harder!"

Turing was a highly intelligent and troubled eccentric, who missed out on much of the accolades and recognition of his work by cutting his own life short in 1954. In spite of his codebreaking prowess, which resulted in the cracking of encrypted German transmissions in World War II, Turing was persecuted in his native England and eventually convicted in 1952 for gross indecency, after admitting to being in a consensual same-sex relationship.

As punishment, the British government sentenced one of the undisputed geniuses of that time to chemical castration, via regular injections of estrogen. Within two years of his sentencing, Turing committed suicide.

The last two years of Turings life remain shrouded in mystery. In 1952, he had to stop his work with the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). In a series of articles on his life, BBCnotes that in 1953, Turing alluded to some type of crisis in his life and suggests that he seemed to have been under intense surveillance.

He took his 1952 and 1953 vacations to Norway and Greece, away from the watchful eyes of the employers for whom he cracked codes and enabled more intelligent warfare against the Germans. BBC surmises that he was very likely influenced by hearing of the early Scandinavian gay movement.

In former Prime Minister Gordon Browns official 2009 apology to Turing, long since deceased, Brown referred to the cultural icon as, one of Britain's most famous victims of homophobia. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction, Brown wrote. Homosexuality remained a crime in the UK until 1967.