Alan Turing's life

Alan Turing is often described as the father of modern computer science. His idea of creating a machine to turn thought processes into numbers was a turning point in the history of computers.

Turing, born in London in 1912, developed some of his most significant theories while studying mathematics at Cambridge in the 1930s. However, despite his brilliance, he suffered from a feeling of isolation, and found it difficult to make friends.

After graduating, Turing went to Princeton in the US, where he began work on what was later to become the first digital computer program: the Turing Machine". His revolutionary idea was for a machine that would read a series of 1s and 0s and Os from a tape describing the steps needed to solve a problem or task. It was only years later that technology had advanced sufficiently to transfer these ideas into real machines.

Back in England, Turing helped the Allies win World War Il by decoding encrypted German communications. The German Enigma machine generated a constantly changing code to make it impossible to decipher.

But Turing' s creation of Colossus - the first fully electronic digital computer - managed to crack the Enigma's codes and reveal secret Nazi war plans. The story is told in the film The Imitation Game.After the war, Turing continued research into digital computers. In 1946 he developed the Automatic Computing Engine, a revolutionary electronic computer with a high-speed memory and stored programs. In 1950 he wrote an article entitled 'Comptiting machinery and intelligence', which was one of the first to deal with the concept of artificial intelligence. He believed an intelligent machine could be created by following the model of the human brain. He compared devices such as cameras and microphones to parts of the human body and his views often landed him in controversy with other scientists.

His 'Turing Test' has become a standard measure of artificial intelligence. In the test an interrogator asks questions via keyboard to a human being and to an intelligent machine, both unseen. If the interrogator is unable to distinguish the human from the machine, based on their answers, then the machine can be described as 'thinking'.

Turing refused to conform to accepted ideas. Always an outsider, he also felt marginalised because of his homosexuality.He died mysteroiusly of poisoning, possibly suicide, in June 1954, but he left the world a permanent legacy.