2024-08-25 04:00:09
By Delphine Billouard-Fuentes – Associate Professor, EM Lyon Business School.
Known to the general public thanks to the film Imitation Game (2014), Alan Turing is an English mathematician born in 1912. This film retraces a significant period of his life, during which he played a key role in deciphering the messages of the German army during the Second World War. But the richness of his research goes far beyond his contribution to the Allied victory: computer pioneer and of theartificial intelligencehe remains a prominent figure even today.
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An attraction to science from childhood
Son of a civil servant posted to India, Alan Turing began his schooling in a boarding school in England. Inattentive in literary subjects, he is considered a not very bright student, lacking concentration. However, he develops a passion for science, reading works on natural sciences. Very young, he is passionate about the regularity of forms in nature and thinks that it is possible to determine the laws that govern their construction.
After leaving boarding school, his level in mathematics allowed him to join King’s College, Cambridge, a very selective establishment, to prepare a degree in mathematics. After publishing several articles and obtaining a research grant, he decided to concentrate his work on the decision problemproblem formulated by the mathematician David Hilbert in 1900. The question here is whether there is a process mechanical which allows to determine after a certain number of steps whether a statement mathematical is true or false.
The Turing machine, ancestor of the modern computer
This advance in mathematics led Alan Turing to question the resolution of computable problems. He established that computable problems could be broken down into different steps and imagined that each of these steps could be carried out by a machine. He developed an abstract calculating machine, called a Turing machine.
This consists of a long strip of paper divided into cells. Each cell can contain a 1, a 0 or an empty space. A read/write head can read the contents of each cell and possibly modify it. After each reading, the head can either move left or right, or modify the value written in the cell. A transition table tells the machine what action to perform depending on the value contained in the cell. Alan Turing’s thinking even led him to consider creating a universal Turing machine, which could reproduce the operation of all Turing machines. This concept lays the foundations of what will be modern computing, with a single computer allowing different programs to be used depending on the objective. After the publication of an article on this invention, Alan Turing left for the United States to prepare a doctorate at Princeton University. However, he returned to England after 2 years in 1938, as the Second World War was looming.
From the “Turing bomb” to the first computers
Upon his return to England, Alan Turing joined the Government Code and Cypher School to train in the cryptographyHe joined the British intelligence headquarters at Bletchley Park in September 1939 to help decode messages exchanged by the German army.
A pioneer in computer science who foresaw computer intelligence and helped the Allies win World War II, Alan Turing met a tragic end.
Yiming Ma/Unsplash, CC BY
Early in the war, the Germans won many victories, using a coding machine called Enigma to transmit orders to troops in the field. This machine allowed messages to be encoded using keys encryption changed every day. Alan Turing helped crack this code by creating the “Turing bombs”, machines that could decrypt messages sent by testing all possible encryption keys in a very short time. Thus, in 1942, between 40,000 and 80,000 messages were decrypted each month! Some historians estimate that tens of thousands of lives were saved thanks to these machines.
After the war, Alan Turing joined the National Physical Laboratory near London, where he designed the plans for a prototype of the Automatic Computing Machine (ACE), the first computer prototype designed in England, which was put into service in 1950 in a simplified version. But a laboratory at the University of Manchester succeeded in finalizing the first computer in 1948, using the principles of the universal Turing machine to develop it. Alan Turing then joined the University of Manchester, where he took on the role of deputy director of the computer laboratory.
Cognitive science, the founding discipline of artificial intelligence
Still passionate about natural sciences, Alan Turing gradually considered the possibility of building a equivalent to the human brain. He imagines the latter as a machine, which would be unorganized at birth and which would become so through training. He then hypothesizes that machines could in turn develop a form of intelligence, defining the bases of artificial intelligence. This innovative idea lays the foundations of cognitive science, a multidisciplinary field whose objective is to describe and explain the processes of knowledge.
The many coils of the Turing Bombe, a machine used to unlock the parameters of Enigma, changed every day. The machine is on display at Bletchley Park Museum, where Turing worked.
Image Wikimedia
To demonstrate this intelligence of machines, he developed a test, called test the Turing or “imitation game”. In this test, a human evaluator observes a written conversation between a human and a machine, and must determine which interlocutor is the machine. If he has not succeeded after 5 minutes, the test is considered successful. This test is still relevant today with the emergence of conversational artificial intelligences such as ChatGPT or Perplexity. These generative AIs have indeed succeeded several times in passing the Turing test. For some, however, this shows that this criterion is not strong enough to determine what truly constitutes intelligence.
A remarkable scientist, but late recognition
In the early 1950s, Alan Turing returned to his earlier interests and used his wide-ranging knowledge to study the growth of living things. He published a article in which he models the growth of biological forms using very complex differential equations. This article will be fundamental for the field of developmental biology. The last years of Alan Turing’s life will be darker. Accused of homosexuality, he accepts chemical castration treatment to avoid prison. One year after the end of this treatment, he is found dead at home after committing suicide by cyanide poisoning, possibly by eating an apple, found bitten near his bed. He will never have been able to see the impact of his research, particularly in the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence.
In 1966, the computer community, through theAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM), pays tribute to Alan Turing by creating the prix Turingan award given each year to a person selected for their contributions to the computer science community. This award is considered to be equivalent to a Nobel Prize in computer science and pays the most beautiful tribute to this essential scientist.
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