Story of a Genius: The Life of Alan Turing | Father of Artificial Intelligence

Alan Turing is a British computer scientist, mathematician, and philosopher who is known today as the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. His outstanding achievements during his short life are the result of the adventures of a beautiful mind. In this video, we are going to take a look at the life of this genius. Alan Matheson Turing was born on the 23rd of July, 1912 in London. He was the second child of Julius Matheson and Ethel Turing, who descended from a famous family in England. Alan's father was a British civil servant in South India, where he met Ethel. Before Alan's brilliance, the fame of the Turing family was mostly due to their skill in fishing. Alan's parents were not interested in continuing their children's education in India, so they left the responsibility of taking care of them to a retired military couple in England. Alan and his brother were forced to attend various schools, which often had little respect for innovation and emphasized the teaching of literature and religious issues. However, Alan Turing's pure talent lay in mathematics and chemistry, and he showed little interest in other subjects. Alan was not only gifted with genius, but he also had a great interest in education, to the point where he once had to ride 97 kilometers on the first day of school due to a general strike and spend the night in a guest house. He was so interested in mathematics that in 1927, he was solving complex problems without even having a study in the field of elementary calculation methods. He even made detailed investigations on Einstein's studies related to the theory of relativity, but the high school authorities did not allow him to use the name of this center in his studies due to the fear of ridicule by other scientific institutions. During this time, he met another person named Christopher Morcombe, who was also very interested in mathematics, but died sometime later due to drinking contaminated milk and contracting bovine tuberculosis. The loss of Morcombe had an unpleasant effect on Alan's religious beliefs, and he was inclined towards materialism and atheism. The contents of the letters he wrote to Morcombe's mother indicate his encounter with the question of how human thoughts are placed in the form of matter. It is here that the most important question of Alan's life is formed in his mind, is it possible to make a machine that thinks? After finishing high school, Turing entered King's College, Cambridge, which despite his freer thinking, drew a clear line between applied and pure mathematics, a red line that Alan never accepted. Alan had a rather anxious personality in his non-working life, but he was very bold and reckless in scientific debates. He was studying in this center between 1931 and 1934, and his outstanding achievements earned him the first class medal of honor in mathematics. In 1935, at the age of 22, he was chosen as a member of the faculty for proving the central limit theory, however, the university authorities did not know that Waldemar Leinberg had proved this theory 13 years ago. A year later, in a paper entitled On Computable Numbers, Turing explained the principles of a general machine that had extensive computability. This tool, which later became known as the Turing machine, is the basic concept of today's computers. He imagines this machine as a device that works with a certain number of modes and based on a tape as memory, the similarity of this machine to today's computers is undeniable. During the next two years, Turing studied mathematics and cryptography at the Center for Advanced Study in Princeton, and after receiving a PhD from Princeton University, he returned to Cambridge to work at the British Cryptography Organization. During World War II, Alan Turing was one of Britain's best decryption experts, adept at breaking German codes. At this time, with the cooperation of other experts, he managed to break the Enigma code, which was designed by the Nazis to send encrypted messages. In December 1940, he discovered the Navy's Enigma decoding system, which was mathematically more complex than that of other forces. His work at the Center required collaboration with other forces, but Alan Turing had his own temperament and is even known to have chained his glass to a bar to prevent it from being stolen. In 1945, the war over, Turing moved to London and worked at the National Physical Laboratory. Among his outstanding achievements during this period, we can point out the supervision of the Automatic Computing Engineer Project and the initial design of computers that stored program instructions in electronic memory. This early model was used by technology companies around the world for several years and transformed the early personal computers. Turing continued his research on logic and digital systems, and it was during this time that he posed another important question, can a machine be made that plays chess? To expand this topic, he followed extensive studies in the field of biology and reached a point that today's experts are doing in the neural networks of the world, creating an artificial intelligence equal to the mind of a child and training it. In 1950, Alan Turing discussed the subject of artificial intelligence in an article entitled Computing Machinery and Intelligence and designed the Turing test as a standard for artificial intelligence, which left a great impact in the following decades. It is good to know that Turing had a good talent in endurance running. He also participated in marathon and was the champion in the amateur category. He once planned to participate in the 1948 Olympics, but he lost this opportunity due to an injury during training. In 1952, Turing was accused of having an illicit relationship with a 19-year-old named Arnold Murray, but he never bothered to defend or deny the accusation. Due to his outstanding role in the defeat of the Nazi forces and significant services in the development of machine systems, the court gave him a choice between a long prison term and injections of hormonal drugs, and he chose the latter. A year of continuous injection of estrogen hormone left a lot of changes on his body, which finally ended in depression and isolation. In addition, all security clearances and licenses to work on decryption systems in government agencies were also revoked from him. On 8th of June, 1954, when Alan Turing was no more than 41 years old, his housekeeper found his lifeless body in his bedroom. A bitten apple was found next to his bed, which was confirmed to be contaminated with cyanide. Many attribute this death to Turing's suicide due to depression, an issue his mother never dealt with. Turing, like many other scientists and artists, was not appreciated as much as he should have been during his lifetime, but after his death, the value of his achievements became clear. Among the countless monuments, statues, and memorials that were built to honor this outstanding scientist, we only mention the following. Establishment of the annual Turing Prize, equivalent to the Nobel of the World of Computing in 1966. Naming one of the main streets of Manchester in 1994. Installation of a one-and-a-half-ton statue in Belchy Park in 2007. In 2009, the government of Gordon Brown expressed regret for the way this scientist was treated, and the English Parliament pardoned him from his accusations in 2013 after extensive requests and collecting thousands of signatures by Turing's supporters. Also, in 2014, a movie called The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing was made, which is about the life of this scientist. Alan Turing is known as the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. Although he is not the inventor of the computer, there is no doubt that his work in terms of theory and practice created an important branch of mathematics, calculation, and logic that we know as computer science. The science that is now being used with the development of complex methods to build neural networks and artificial intelligence will definitely have deep and lasting effects on other branches of science and human life, which we are witnessing now. If you want to learn more about the applications of artificial intelligence, refer to the video that is already available on our channel and you can see its link. Thank you for being with us and supporting us by liking and subscribing to the channel.