Alan Turing

Turing award, Turing machine, Turing Test, chances are you have heard of at least one of these if you are in the world of computer science because it was related to Alan Turing, one of the most influential computer scientists in the history. Born in London, England on June 23rd of 1912 and later went on to Sherborn School at the age of 13, Alan Turing was heavily invested in math and science. He went on to study at King’s College, University of Cambridge, where he managed to prove central limit theorem on his own even though he was not the first to prove it.

Right after graduating from King’s College, he published a paper, in 1936, "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" which was the first time universal machine was presented, which was then renamed as "Universal Turing Machine" and then the famous "Turing machine", which is a mathematical model of computation that defines an abstract machine. This paper had made a huge impact on the world of computer science, since in the 1930s, the field of computer science is still not understood well, thus Turing machine have been established as the model of computation since it was the simplest at that point of time. After publishing the paper, Alan Turing then went on to study Mathematics and cryptology at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and got a PHD at the Princeton University in 1938. He then returned and worked with the British code-breaking organization.

Then, World War 2 started, Alan Turing joined the code breaking team in Bletchley park, a central site for code breakers during World War 2. Before he created the famous Bombe machine, the Polish had a method of deciphering code that the Nazi communicated with the Enigma machine, a really machine that sends and receives encoded messages. Then the Nazis improved their Enigma machine, making the Polish method of deciphering obsolete. Alan Turing then stepped in and upgraded the Polish machine "bomba" and created the bombe machine, which could decipher an Enigma message in just a mere 15 minutes. To put in into perspective, there are about fifteen quintillion combinations to encrypt an Enigma message, and it only took Alan Turing about five and a half months to upgrade the machine and crack the Enigma codes. This invention indirectly saved about 14 million lives in World War 2. His time in Bletchley Park not only helped many lives in World War 2 but he also wrote two papers on mathematical approach to code-breaking which helped further advanced cryptography.

Not only that, Alan Turing also contributed in the world of Artificial Intelligence, when he published the paper "Computing machinery and intelligence", which was where the Turing Test was created from. Turing test, which is an intelligence design standard that we are still trying to achieve. Basically, the test was to see if an artificial intelligence was capable of a human-level interaction.

Even though Alan Turing had such a huge contribution to the world of computer science, he had a tragic death. He was convicted of homosexuality relationship which barred him from continuing his work on cryptography. Following that incident, he was found dead from Cyanide poisoning.

Even to this day, Alan Turing is still being spoken of and being recognized, for example, NVIDIA naming their previous lineup as Turing GPU. He will forever be remembered as one of the most influential computer scientists in history.