Alan Turing - BBC Horizon Documentary

thinking is a function of man's immortal soul God has given an immortal soul to every man and woman but not to any other animal water machines hence no animal or machine can think I am unable to accept any part of this here's a person who discovered the most important thing in logic and he invented the concept of the stored-program computer and he did these wonderful things in biology and cryptography and started artificial intelligence and he ran marathons and rode bicycles and had terrible sexual problems and but I don't know anything about this person and and yet here's the key figure of our century but I don't know him I wish I did Alan Matheson Turing mathematician codebreaker and inventor of the computer was born in London in 1912 his father was in the Indian Civil Service in Madras so apart from the holidays Allen and his older brother spent much of their child who had farmed out to Guardians on the south coast and at boarding school when he was 10 Allen was given a book which excited and focused his intellectual curiosity one chapter was about the nature of the mind where we do our thinking was to fascinate during for most of his short life in 1926 Turing was sent to Sherman school the general strike had stopped the trains so he arrived by back an English public school in the 1920s was not the ideal environment for someone of Turing's particular interests and abilities he should do very well when he finds his metier but meanwhile would do much better if you try his best as a member of this school he should have more esprit de corps I surely mathematics not very good he spends a good deal of time apparently in investigations in advanced mathematics to the neglect of his elementary work his work is dirty I hope you will not fall between two stools if he has to stay at a public school he must aim at becoming educated if he has to be solely a scientific specialist he's wasting his time at a public school at 15 and a half during wrote for his mother Sarah a short account of Einstein's ideas he has now got to find the general law for the motion of bodies it will have of course to satisfy the general principle of relativity he does not actually give the law which i think is a pity so I will the separation between any two events in the history a Turing found someone else to share his passion for mathematics and science well when he was 16 Alan Turing fell in love with another boy at Shelbourne boy called Christopher Morcom I was hopeless unrequited love must be very very painful and difficult to deal with anyway but it did have some importance tutoring immediately because he became more communicative he seemed to realise that there was more point to other people to doing things to getting on in the world making more of a success in his academic work and in fact the point of his life became really to be a student with Christopher at Cambridge now a Christopher in fact did win a scholarship to Cambridge in 1929 and then it happened Krishna suddenly died is in February 1930 and Turing was really quite shattered by this dear mrs. Moore come I want to say how sorry I am about Chris my most vivid recollections of him are almost entirely of the kind things he said to me sometimes of course I simply worshiped the ground he trod on a thing which I did not make much attempt to disguise I'm sorry to say I should be grateful if you could find me sometime a little snapshot of Chris to remind me of his example and of his efforts to make me careful and neat I shall miss his face and the way he used to smile at me sideways mrs. Markham invited him to stay at their house and they shared something they wanted to see in the meeting what had happened that it wasn't just that Christopher had died but that somehow he lived on now Allan tiering wanted to believe that the Christopher Malcolm's minds somehow still survives he wrote to mrs. Markham frequently saying he felt Christopher was helping him but you see he didn't just want to think of this as a comforting thought a happy convenient belief he had to have a scientific reason for believing this was actually true Christopher's death inspired him to look very seriously at what modern science was saying about the nature of mind how the mind can be embodied in the physical world by the time the memorial window to Christopher Morcom had been dedicated Turing had been up at Cambridge for two years at King's College Science and Mathematics were taken seriously and so was during he was awarded a fellowship at the age of twenty-two someone made up a rhyme about it Turing must have been alluring to get made a dawn so early on the unique thing about King's College that Jerry must have found as soon as he arrived here is that it gave a particular kind of atmosphere of moral support for anyone who is homosexual as the Turing was discovering that he was and there were well-known figures there who one reads about people I may not Ken's and so forth who well well-documented in their relationships but it wasn't just there's a real sense of moral seriousness that one should be what one what one is and that's the right thing to be in the right thing to feel buttering especially he has a very fresh view of everything he didn't see things in the conventional way he always had to try to get a different look at everything and that was the secret to his intellectual work and this sense of a different nests and unorthodoxy is all part and parcel of his sexuality and of his intellectual life as well Turing's ideas about computing machines emerged in 1935 when he solved a profound and abstruse problem in the foundations of mathematical logic Hilbert's and shadings problem at the turn of the century the German mathematician David Hilbert had asked was mathematics decidable did there exist a definite method which could in principle be applied to any assertion and which was guaranteed to produce a correct decision as to whether that assertion was true Turing later said that it was while outrunning and grant just a meadow that he had first seen how to answer Hilbert's question the difficulty of a question as a mathematical question it's not just about mathematics you see it's about what you mean by a method a rule a very vague word where he might use in everyday life but not with a clearly defined meaning well Alan Turing gave it a meaning an absolutely precise meaning because he thought well what were to such a rule or procedure be it would be something you could do mechanically something you could do apply let a machine work on and now in 1935 there were no such machines this is just an imaginary machine it's a machines thought but he made it into absolutely definite idea and it's the idea of the Turing machine and I can quite see that it would be at one spot at one moment they could have seen how you could use this precise idea and whole thing would click Turing's paper described how any logical process could be broken down into its simplest components precise sequential steps that could in principle be carried out by a machine with this new definition of method as machine he was able to formulate a logical paradox which rapidly disposed of Hilbert's question only somebody totally original and uninfluenced by fashion could have written that paper its purpose which was not the same as its ultimate influence was to show that a certain task was impossible and that again is very very difficult to do and indeed difficult to understand most people would think that if you sort of the fact that people have tried to do something a lot and failed would more or less show that it was impossible but that's not the case because one day somebody might find how to do it and what Alan Matt was was trying to Tim's from succeed in demonstrating was that a certain task could never be performed well Turing's ideas didn't just stop at the technical field of mathematical logic his vision was much larger than that and the thing that really drove him on was thinking what is a mental process what is any process by which by thinking we could arrive at any conclusion at all what are our brains doing when we're thinking and that was the argument in the background of this paper that he then wrote in 1935 in 1936 and his argument was that any mental process whatever assuming that the brain works in some definite way which it must do it must have a mechanical basis to it then it must be something which could be simulated by a Turing machine so he had a way of formulating what any possible mental process must be that was his general argument and that's the argument which looms larger and larger and his thought and is now the basis of his ideas about artificial intelligence in the course of solving Hilbert's problem Turing had an insight of the greatest importance his original conception had required a different Turing machine for each logical task but he went on to imagine a universal machine which could read and execute the instruction set of any single Turing machine and therefore perform all possible logical tasks he had an effect formulated the idea of the stored-program computer and it didn't matter too much what the actual hardware details of the machine was as long as you were sure that the individual steps were dead simple so he needed a some way of imagining this so he concocted the idea of a paper tape which had either 0 or 1 in each cell and a very simple imaginary machine which just chugged back and forth left and right on this single paper tape which was imagined to be infinitely extended in both directions and what he proved was that such a simple machine with a finite number of separate states in it each state saying what would happen if you saw a 0 or a 1 whether you'd move left or right and whether you would erase the symbol and replace it with the other one or leave the symbol as it is that that's all you needed in order to compute any computable function so it was a sort of existence proof that there could be a mechanical device which by simply compounding and iterating all of these simple steps could do any computation that any human being sitting at a desk and using his wits could do well it's very surprising that tearing could do this he was a complete outsider to the field of mathematical logic all the experts in that field in America or Germany they'd never heard of him he was only 23 and he was a no.1 in the mathematical world and so and yet he came up with his idea which really changed the field was completely accepted it's now the foundation of modern computer science but why could he do this I mean apart from being clever I think the thing is he had his underlying fascination with the whole question of how to describe the mind what the mind is how it can be embodied in matter and it goes back to all his wanderings at the time of Christopher Morcom death the answers that he tried to find then well he abandoned those lines of thought and came onto this new line which used this new idea of a computer logic as weed now think of it you the full beauty depth and power of Turing's revolutionary ideas would not be appreciated for years during himself was about to be caught up in something far removed from the purity of mathematical logic a convoy at sea one of the lifelines upon which the United Nations war effort relies obviously the world's battle fronts must be kept constantly supplied with food and materials of all kinds Admiral donitz and the German Navy are determined to see that these supplies don't get through and the you Bert is certainly Hitler's most effective weapon the you Bert in fact films one of the most powerful threats to Allied victory the Nazi High Command was determined to avoid a repetition of the dead bark of the First World War when British intelligence routinely decoded German military signal traffic the key was an inciting machine called enigma enigma machines were produced by the thousand and used by the entire German military system every u-boat carried one to receive operational orders to stop the u-boats enigma had to be broken enigma was the most advanced and ciphering device of its time it encoded messages via an electromechanical system incorporating moving wheels or rotors a character typed on the keyboard was sent through the rotors electrically and the code equivalent read off an illuminated panel the rotors change their relative positions during in cipher meant to scramble the patterns a Code Breaker looks for the cipher circuits also went through a plug board which switched letter pairs rotor and plug board configurations were changed at regular intervals sometimes daily the codebreakers task was to identify the start positions of the rotors and unravel the plugboard setup the difficulties were formidable the one can say how many different possible states that were for the machine which was of the order of 10 raised to the power 19 in other words a 1 followed by about 19 0 M is great and I think the u-boat enigma which had an extra wheel was more like 10 to the 22 approximately well that gives you some idea but it doesn't really give you a full idea because clearly you couldn't possibly work through all those possibilities that would be known as the British Museum attack on on the system exhaustive attack you have to break down the attack in some way and of course that's what we were doing halfway between Oxford and Cambridge Bletchley Park was the headquarters of the wartime British code breaking effort the postal address was room 47 foreign office 50 years later the cryptanalytic machines no longer exist and some of the methods used are still secret mathematicians chess players linguists statisticians and engineers were recruited from all over Britain at its height the Bletchley operation involved 10,000 people Alan Turing was one of the first to arrive he'd always been interested in codes and ciphers from school anyway and so it's amazing thing that after thinking about these abstract processes and methods that he was doing in thinking about the idea of the Turing machine he found himself now actually responsible for real methods in a very real world and in fact the most sophisticated methods and processes had ever been thought of than the most complicated mechanical ideas that probably ever been used in fight against the German Enigma machine tools most important contribution that I think was part of the design of the bomb the cryptanalytic machine he had the idea that you could use in effect a theorem in logic which sounds to the untrained ear rather absurd namely that from a contradiction you can deduce everything it was like like a joke in mathematical logic which had this payoff in the crypt analysis procedure and in the types of machines which they went on to build in 1940 always touch-and-go very very difficult every month every year was a new battle with new details new complications new sophistications that were introduced cheering in the thick of that all the time and applying not just logic but really sophisticated ideas in statistics completely new methods new ideas for how to solve the problems which arose I'm not an intelligence person I mean I don't not a historian but one thing was clear there was a period when we couldn't decipher the u-boat traffic and the shipping losses were appalling during that period and as soon as we got eventually on top of that Newburgh traffic it was absolutely clear what difference it was making to our successes against the u-boats and in bringing cargo into I run election yes I felt that he was a character he was eccentric in the sense that he changed his mug to the to the radiator so that no one else would take it he was I suppose you'd say eccentric in that when he was cycling into the office he would wear a an army guest mask because of his hay fever I think other people would have been prepared to sneeze all the way but he felt that the logical thing to do was to wear a gas mask I would have thought it was really good with people because he didn't turn he didn't start from any point of view except just there were people if they were interesting they interested him if they went they probably didn't but I don't think people were an important feature of his life I don't know there must have been some people who mattered a lot to him certainly but machines and ideas whether his real love I believe early in the war Turing had found himself attracted to a young mathematician and Bletchley Crypt analyst called Joan Clarke I suppose the fact that that was a woman LaHood made me different we did do some things together perhaps went for cinema and so on but certainly it was just surprised to me when he said I think his words probably were um would you consider marrying me but some voters are surprised I really didn't hesitate in saying yes and then he knocked by my chair and kissed me though we didn't have very much physical contact now next day I suppose we went a bit of a walk together after lunch he told me that he had this homosexual tendency and naturally that worried me a bit because I didn't know that that was something which was almost certainly permanent but um we carried on and it was quite delightful they were really sweet together I was very upset when when it broke up and I didn't fully understand it although Alan Turing had an attempt to explain it to me which I think was perhaps not entirely the full the full explanation we didn't know till after World War two that Turing was homosexual at least I did not know there may have been some people in Europe perhaps Joan Clarke knew it could have been one reason that he gave to her for breaking off the engagement for all I know um but it was probably a good thing that the security people didn't know because he might then have been fired and we might've lost the war well of course for anyone who who wanted to get on with scientific research as Turing did the war could have been a just a terrible waste of time and in some ways it must have been trailin tearing but it gave him an awful lot in a very amazing way you see at Bletchley you'd seen by the end of the war thousands and thousands of people thousands of machines all working away at these special sophisticated methods these processes that he and other people had developed an enormous scale now what he could see as probably no one else could see is that all these different methods and processes all these special machines could in fact be programs for a universal machine wartime code breaking was of course a life and death matter speed was everything and towards the end of the war cryptanalytic machines like the Colossus used electronics because they were so much faster than the older electromechanical systems Turing saw that electronics were the key to realizing his dream of a universal machine a real-life programmable computer now he wanted practical experience of working with electronics he got his chance in 1944 when he designed a speech and ciphering machine code named Delilah when I arrived he was who already started building this speech encoder and he liked doing things himself very much I mean he regards very important one ought to be able to do things oneself he was fairly clumsy and he had to me a very curious habit of it's called a breadboard or actually his was called the bird's nest was there's great mass of ours and then condenses and resistors and so on and he was always swapping the mind to try and improve something although it was here and so he would take resulting on he always sold it with a high tension left arm I can't think wise how my first memory of coming to shop is there was this father scruffy-looking civilian-military Jackie bent over the bird's nest maybe 9200 in fact Delilah worked well but was never used the war was over for a while it looked as if Turing was going to get what he really wanted he was recruited by the National Physical Laboratory the NPO to design what would have been the world's first actual Universal machine the automatic computing engine or ace I think he thought that when he went to the NPL he was going to make an electronic brain rather as he had made or he had made for him this secure speech device and he spent several months working out the basis of the ACE and got it to the stage which now you start making things and at that stage he saw this metaphorically was rolling up his sleeves and saying right now get out my American Beauty and get down to making this brain and the NPL said oh no you don't you're the sort of chap who tells us how we make one but we have experts and we have contractors who make things for us and he rather took offense at this so he told me that they'd employed him to make a brain and they weren't letting him do it his vision was of a computer and programming which could simulate mental processes it seemed to him that the NPL were more interested in a mere calculating machine he took up running seriously possibly out of frustration with the snail's pace of progress on the ACE the truth was that the eccentric brilliance boldness and originality which had made during a national asset during the war were not appreciated in peacetime Britain bureaucratic delay at the NPL obstruction and political rivalry all conspired against him a pilot version of the ACE was built it took five years but Turing was long gone he had left the NPL and gone back to Cambridge once again Kings accepted him and appreciated him for what he was he renewed his friendship with Robin Gandhi now a Cambridge graduate student he lent me a book I am mad mad for book and as I took it a page fluttered out of it which was a photograph of two page boys at the Royal Wedding and someone else was with us and you said oh yes you find pretty pictures like that in my books then the next day he came to it said I think you ought to know and he was very relieved to find when Jaime I'd then love him is actually my time and that I wasn't in the least bit chockful or didn't think it extraordinary it and of course that made a much closer bond in our friendship to call him all these perhaps wrong but unusual certainly and he had one of the first things I saw with his enormous fingers with these extraordinary striping on his fingernails I really don't know what caused that but the great point was that it anyways with me and my friends so very lively so very amusing and his ideas were always bubbling about what about certainty about mathematics cuz I was a fellow mathematician but culture in general I mean used to lend me books and he certainly expected you to be able to read foreign languages he lent me a book by she'd in French and then a mathematics book in German these are pretty high standards I think for expected while Turing was in retreat at King's computer engineering was moving ahead elsewhere in the United States and in Britain Manchester University where anyone who urgently wishes to know whether to ^ 127 - 1 is a prime number or not can be given the answer by an electronic brain in 25 minutes instead of by a human brain in 6 months setting a machine for this kind of problem takes a week then the brain is switched on and impulses passing to the computer make the actual calculation by 1948 a team of engineers in Manchester have got a small digital computer up and running based on Turing's ideas it was limited in memory and power but Turing was very keen to see what it could do he took up a research post at Manchester University and began writing experimental programs he developed his ideas about the similarities between minds and machines and in 1950 he published a prophetic essay I propose to consider the question can machines think this should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms machine and think the definitions might be framed so as to reflect as far as possible the normal use of the words but this attitude is dangerous what Turing's argument suggests is that the things that it should be possible to compute with neurons in the brain are exactly the same things that it should be possible to compute with say transistors inside a computer that's kind of a scary thought because it suggests that you and I are able that there were machines somehow or at least what we're able to ever think is somehow the same set of things that a computer could think and a lot of people find that a very threatening thought because it suggests since it suggests that somehow maybe they're not so worthwhile if they're just a computer we're used to computers computers are dumb machines we know that they don't they're not valuable in the sense that people are valuable and so somehow people find it very insulting the notion that they're a machine and yet Turing's argument is that what you can compute doesn't matter what you're built out of that's that's the essence of it and so it doesn't really matter that we're built a biological components what we can compute is the same as what a transistor computer could compute Turing went on to suggest a game or test could a judge asking questions over a teletype link decide whether a human being or a machine was sending back the answers if not we would surely have to concede that the machine could be said to think during predicted that this would happen within 50 years in November 1991 a version of the Turing test was staged at the computer Museum in Cambridge Massachusetts can machines think I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion while we have nine years to go on torence prophecy and as astonishing as this with no doubt seem to Descartes Tory might well be proved correct now his ruff this was the first event in an annual competition with an ultimate prize of $100,000 for the first computer program which can persuade the judges that they're communicating with a human being whether that amount of memory is enough to support real thinking is another matter Turing's original test was unrestricted a judge could ask anything at all about any subject the Cambridge version was heavily restricted the competition judges were confined to specialized topics to give existing computer programs a chance okay tell me about the romantic problem between Heathcliff and Catherine in the book weathering Heights you like more things in the relationship than you dislike I don't understand this response in the context of weathering heights what in particular is so hard to understand it doesn't make sense for me but I'll move on to a different question second grade school topics hello I'm Laurie well don't you have a pretty name I guess you're pretty proud of it since so you keep on repeating it what you doing second grade I do a lot of gymnastics the window is a program called whimsical conversation whimsical conversation didn't just win it was judged to be a human being by five out of the ten judges problems and interpersonal relationships was judged to be a human being by two judges second grade school topics was judged to be a human being by one judge we have another ten years to go roughly speaking before we'll know whether Touring's 50-year prediction is right or wrong it's I think perfectly conceivable it might actually happen that before the turn of the century a computer will pass the unrestricted Turing test I rather doubt that'll happen I rather doubt that'll ever happen but not for deep interesting reasons not because it's impossible in principle but for boring reasons of cost-effectiveness compare the task of passing the unrestricted Turing tests to the task of making a robotic barn swallow that can fly around in a room catch insects on the fly and then land safely on the twig of an apple tree I don't think anybody thinks that's in principle impossible but it would take billions of research and development to make this tiny robotic birding it wouldn't be much of the payoff if what you want to know about is aerodynamics or ornithology there are better ways of spending your research dollars and I think the same thing is true about the about the Turing test getting those last that last 10% of verisimilitude without which a human being will always unmask the computer would have almost no theoretical interest but would be terribly time consuming back in 1950 Turing was using the Manchester computer to explore a new interest he had discovered in biology and cell differentiation at the same time he was heading for trouble when post there was this letter from Manchester and it was from Aaron and it came I may say it's a great surprise to me because although I'd realized that that he was gay and indeed one of his boyfriends was used to come to lectures with me I didn't know that he went picking up Rough Trade in the streets and getting involved with the police so I was at the startled here's the letter My dear norman i now got myself into the kind of trouble that i've always considered to be quite a possibility for me though i've usually rated is it about ten to one against I shall shortly be pleading guilty to a charge of sexual offences with a young man the story of how it all came to be found out is a long and fascinating one which I shall have to make into a short story one day but I haven't time to tell you now no doubt I shall emerge from it all a different man but quite who I have not found out I'm rather afraid that the following syllogism may be used by some in the future cheering believes that machines think cheering lies with men therefore machines do not think yours in distress well it was quite a story in November 1951 Alan Turing finished his first big paper in mathematical biology and he felt very proud and pleased at having got this out of the way and I think it was then he decided to give himself a little bit of a break and in December he met a young man on the Oxford Road in Manchester a chap called Arnold who well after a little bit of getting to know each other and an invited back to his house and there began a a relationship which had his ups and downs and there were difficult isn't it Arnold unfortunately had been rather boasting his relationship with this very impressive chap who told him about working on the electronic brain all these things in Manchester University and had let him out of his see Alan's address on a letter that he was sending to and this other chap Harry went and burgled during house and then there was the whole story about the police he and his innocence because he was a total innocent in his innocence went to the police when his young friend and said he perhaps knew who had done it and said oh I know it's done it and the police of course were interested in knowing how he got this information and it was all pulled out of him anybody more sophisticated and more more knowledge of the world would realize that that was what was going to happen he'd tell me about it and then and he complained a bit about there where the please try to catch a mouse and so on then he said well you see and then they they made a transcript of our interview and he said of course it was a total caricature but it wasn't totally inaccurate for example he said Tareq I was having an affair with him question.what softened affair arm sir on the typescript sauce on Murph internal friction and neutral masturbation and Terry Ward laughter well cheering was certainly very averse to showing any kind of dishonesty or shame or anything else anything other than clarity if he could help it and perhaps overcompensating for his little fib really made a very full statement about exactly what had happened between him and Arnold and after he'd done that he had no choice so he was clearly guilty of all that he was charged with as a result Turing had been given an OBE in recognition of his secret wartime work though no one of course could say what it was for he had also been consulted on occasion by British intelligence Hugh Alexander top scientific officer at GCHQ appeared in camera as a character witness for Turing he told me two things that amused me one was that when he was talking to Turing beforehand turning brought out a file of everything he had about it and on kind of a file in large letters burglary and buggery because they'd been a burglary which had given rise to the instant and the other thing was he said to Alexander I probably got the figures wrong but the relevant relativity is correct I said you know the worse I can get for what I've done is seven years but if I'd buggered a sheep it might be 10 and he tackled he had to have psychological treatment I believe and certainly had half Holman therapy and I will remember him describing to me with giggles the effect that it was having on him name it was causing him to grow breasts when he was convicted of homosexuality this put him beyond the pale as far as government employment in secret work was concerned because of us they'd always bothered about blackmail that sort of thing and you wouldn't get a PV certificate positive vetting certificate if you were convicted or even thought to be a homosexual the whole ordeal seems to have left during unrepentant in 1953 he went on holiday in Norway where he'd heard there were dances for men only he was now under police surveillance My dear Norman thanks for your letter I should have answered it earlier I have a delightful story to tell you a matress life when we next meet I've had another round with the rond arm and it's round two to turn off the police of northern England by one reports were out searching for supposed boyfriend of mine it was all a mayor's nest perfect virtue and chastity had governed all our proceedings but the poor sweeties never knew this a very light kiss beneath a phone flag under the influence of brink was all that ever occurred being on probation my shining virtue was terrific and handily if I had so much as parked my bicycle on the wrong side of them very there might have been 12 years for me no time to write about logic now love Ammon during spent more and more time at home working hard on mathematical biology no one who knew him was prepared for what happened next it was the 8th of June 1954 at about 5 o'clock in the afternoon Alan Turing his cows keeper came here with shopping to cook his dinner and she saw immediately something very strange all the lights in the house were on she went in went upstairs to find him and then he was dead in bed he must have died during the holiday weekend there was a strong chemical smell in the room which was later identified as a cyanide and by his bedside there was a half-eaten Apple some people have suspected that the secret service may have at least encouraged him to commit suicide and that there's even a slight suspicion apparently in some circles that they might have contrived to murder him on the grounds that he was too big a security risk that he knew so much and yet he would go abroad to see some young man I could imagine them being quite nervous about that but somehow it seems to me to be far-fetched Turing's mother never accepted the official verdict there was no suicide note he was notoriously careless and he had been amusing himself with a chemistry experiment involving potassium cyanide his mother wrote to me and she said that although it was a verdict of suicide she believed in accident and of course some his method was chosen to make it possible for some at least to believe that I mean you're interested in the reason for your suicide and some people say it's because he was totally bored with being watched by the police but I have a feeling it was tied up with his knowledge that mathematics is a young man's game and that in his mid-forties which i think he was he was never going to make another earth-shaking discovery like his famous computable numbers a lot of people of course while to try and trace reasons why did he do that now I think it's an insult human beings to suppose that one convite at reasons everything they do I should have Devi an eye to someone try to explain my conduct in terms of logical steps people do inexplicable things I think it's important to remember that but the second thing was I did already know that he had discussed ways of committing suicide with two other people I knew they said they both said well we weren't sure whether this was just a an interesting intellectual exercise or whether it was something there as well it it turned out that this went back a long way and obviously the suicidal impulse was something which came up every now and then Alan Turing was cremated on the 12th of June 1954 and his ashes scattered in the gardens of working crematorium there is no memorial I suppose is that the reason that so many of us have a fascination for creating intelligence within a machine is it gets in a very basic way it gets it what we are it gets it what's important about us and in a way I guess it has the potential of freeing us from the constraints of our physical fleshy bodies and I think it's terrible that I'm going to be dead 100 years from now and that's there's fundamentally unfair and I can think of 2,000 years of stuff I want to do and at the end of that I'm sure there'd be another 2,000 years and so on and I love to somehow outlive my body now people have different ways of imagining doing that I mean some people write books and some people have children but in a sense I guess this is this is another kind of children I mean it the idea that that you could put something that was alive and learning and loving in some kind of a body that could last much longer than we do that you've somehow freed yourself from this kind of short term meat body and maybe maybe reached out to something farther something something more important and longer you

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Published: Mon Jan 04 2016