Tag Archives: chemical castration

Alan Turing Year — 2012 Turing Centenary

Posted on by
Reply

Alan Math­i­son Turing, mathematician, code breaker, and inven­tor of the com­puter, was born in Lon­don one hun­dred years ago today, June 23, 2012. But what do we know about this per­son who might right­fully be described as ‘The key fig­ure of our cen­tury’? Per­haps too little.

Dur­ing his rel­a­tively brief life, Tur­ing made a unique impact on the his­tory of com­put­ing, com­puter sci­ence, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, devel­op­men­tal biol­ogy, and the math­e­mat­i­cal the­ory of computability.

His inter­est in code and ciphers started as a boy. Once while in school he was given the book ‘Math­e­mat­i­cal Recre­ations and Essays’ which had a chap­ter on cryp­tog­ra­phy which he found fas­ci­nat­ing. Another book which exited and focused his intel­lec­tual curios­ity as a boy had one chap­ter about the nature of the mind enti­tled ‘Where we do our think­ing’ which cap­ti­vated Tur­ing for most of his life.

At 15, he read for his mother a short account of Einstein’s ideas, mak­ing his own obser­va­tions. And at 16 he fell in love with fel­low pupil Christo­pher Morcom, who shared his pas­sion for sci­ence. It was hope­less unre­quited love. This friend­ship, cut short by Morcom’s death in Feb­ru­ary 1930 from com­pli­ca­tions of tuberculosis.

Alan Tur­ing wanted to believe that Christopher’s mind some­how could sur­vived and he meant it as a sci­en­tific plau­si­bil­ity, not a reli­gious belief. This obses­sion might have been behind his con­cep­tu­al­iz­ing of the Tur­ing machine.

Thanks to Turing’s work deci­pher­ing the Ger­man Enigma Code, the British Navy was able to coun­ter­act the pow­er­ful Ger­man mar­itime war effort.

Tur­ing was arrested under the same law that was used to con­vict Oscar Wilde in 1895. He was con­victed of gross inde­cency fol­low­ing a rela­tion­ship with another man and under­went hor­monal treat­ment (chem­i­cal cas­tra­tion) as an alter­na­tive to prison.

Well I’m not going to get all pseudo philo­soph­i­cal with you guys this time. I just wish really bad I was as bril­liant as lovely Alan. We posted two other pre­vi­ous arti­cles about  Tur­ing that you can read here:

This year marks the cen­te­nary of Alan Turing’s birth &

Dan­ger­ous Knowl­edge Part II

OK, now I invite you to watch the fol­low­ing doc­u­men­tary about his life:

 


This year marks the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth

Posted on by
Reply

I can’t help using a pop­u­lar say­ing to start explain­ing how a feel about an arti­cle on BBC News regard­ing a call from Mem­ber of Par­la­ment Iain Stew­art to ‘par­don’ com­puter pio­neer Alan Tur­ing, so here it is: “L’enfer est plein de bonnes volon­tés et désirs”

Per­haps I am mis­in­ter­pret­ing the mean­ing of the word par­don here, so allow me to use some help from Merrian-Webster:

1: indul­gence
2: the excus­ing of an offense with­out exact­ing a penalty
3
a : a release from the legal penal­ties of an offense
b : an offi­cial war­rant of remis­sion of penalty
4: excuse or for­give­ness for a fault, offense, or discourtesy

I had also read an arti­cle not too long ago regard­ing an e-petition to grant Alan Tur­ing a for­mal par­don. This ini­tia­tives make me trem­ble with right­eous indig­na­tion. For­mer prime min­is­ter (Gor­don Brown) issued an offi­cial apol­ogy on behalf of the gov­ern­ment. So I don’t under­stand the need for a ‘Pardon’. That is one of the prob­lems with rep­re­sen­ta­tives and insti­tu­tions of ‘jus­tice’, they do not apol­o­gize, they grant ‘par­dons’, they were right all along, but they are so mag­nan­i­mous, they for­give our ‘sins’ but we bet­ter com­ply or else…

Tur­ing was arrested under the same law that was used to con­vict Oscar Wilde in 1895. He was con­victed of gross inde­cency fol­low­ing a rela­tion­ship with another man and under­went hor­monal treat­ment (chem­i­cal cas­tra­tion) as an alter­na­tive to prison. Here is an infor­ma­tive arti­cle with some more details about Tur­ing and the whole affair.

Ok,well, enough with the rant. The good news is that this year (23 June) marks the cen­te­nary of his birth and as the arti­cle states, it affords us a great oppor­tu­nity to put right what was done wrong to him. We are hear­ing suggestions.