The Irish Times - Thursday, July 19, 2012

KARLIN LILLINGTON

THE GREAT British mathematician, second World War codebreaker and computer scientist Alan Turing has become one of the heroes of modern computing for his challenging intellect, his intriguing insights into computing problems and artificial intelligence, and of course, his critical role at Britains Bletchley Park in cracking the devilishly complicated Enigma Machine code, which the Nazis used to encrypt messages during the war.

Ultimately, he was treated atrociously by the very government he served so well despite the fact that the cracking of the Enigma code in particular is credited with shortening the length of the war and saving many millions of lives.

He was prosecuted in 1952 under Britains old anti-homosexuality laws, and given the choice of prison or the humility of chemical castration with female hormone injections, choosing if this could even be viewed as a choice the latter. Due to his sexual preference, he was stripped of his high-security clearances and could no longer do the high-level intelligence and mathematical work he loved.

He died in 1954 of cyanide poisoning officially ruled a suicide, although some, including his mother, believed his death was accidental.

This year marks the centenary of his birth, and has seen many global initiatives in his honour. One in Ireland, which provided a multilayered look at Turings legacy, was a well attended session at the Euroscience Open Forum last week at which four speakers weighed his ideas and influence.

UCD philosophy professor Dermot Moran considered whether his famous Turing Test of artificial intelligence could be accepted as a mark of true intelligence; Oxford mathematician (and frequent BBC science presenter) Prof Marcus du Sautoy looked at some mathematical influences behind Turings view of computation, UCD cognitive science professor Mark Keane examined how human activities might be viewed as different forms of computation; and IBM researcher Freddy Lecue delved into the development of artificial intelligence since Turing.

It was an exhilarating afternoon. I found it particularly interesting to hear a philosophers perspective on Turings ideas around artificial intelligence and the Turing Test, which Turing envisioned as a gauge of machine intelligence.

In the test, proposed in his paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, a person would have a conversation at the same time with a human and a computer. They would not be able to see either, and hence would not know which was which. If the human could not distinguish between the other human and machine, Turing proposed that this would be a mark of whether a machine could think.

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Ahead of his time, Turing's pardon is now long overdue