Alan Turing, the pioneering British computer scientist regarded as the father of artificial intelligence, is being celebrated at this year's blinc Digital contemporary digital arts festival in Wales to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth.

The blinc festival, in its second year, will be held on the weekend of Oct. 27-28 in Conwy, North Wales. Curators Craig Morrison and Joel Cockrill have been commissioned to create a laser installation at Conwy Castle that will use programmed "hyperboloids," or Rolling Spheres, to beam "Thank You" in Morse Code across the sky while a plinth on the ground will display Turing's epitaph. Other artists commissioned to produce Turing-inspired digital works include Jessica Lloyd Jones, Ant Dickinson, Helen Booth, festival organizers said.

Turing (June 23, 1912-June 7, 1954) worked as a code breaker during World War II, heading the team tasked with cracking German naval codes at Britain's Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS). Prior to the war while a student at Cambridge, he developed his famous "Turing machine," not an actual computer but rather a hypothetical one that serves as a fundamental tool for understanding how algorithms, computer programming, and computing itself works.

Turing did help design and build functional computational machines in the 1940s and 50s, including groundbreaking experimental computers like the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) while working at Britain's National Physical Laboratory and the Manchester machines at the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory run by the famous mathematician and code breaker Max Newman at Manchester University.

But he is most famous today for the "Turing test." This proposed method for determining if a machine can "think" is considered the basis of the science of artificial intelligence. The annual Loebner Prize competition, initiated in 1990 by the American inventor Hugh Loebner, uses a standard Turing test on computer programs entered in the contest to determine which is the most human-like.

The plinth in the Conwy Castle installation, modeled on the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square in London, "celebrates all that is contemporary in the arts today," Morrison said in a statement.

"Alan Turing's abstract mathematical achievements epitomize what the plinth represents and in some way is responsible for probably most of the artwork that is displayed. His fundamental work in computing has helped to shape what we see in contemporary life. His wartime work on code breaking definitely went towards preserving our freedom of expression," the artist said.

Turing's epitaph, written by the computer scientist to British mathematician and logician Robin Gandy in 1954, reads:

Hyperboloids of Wondrous Light

Rolling for aye through space and time

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Alan Turing to be Honored at Welsh Digital Arts Festival