Dr. Andrew Hodges — Alan Turing: The Enigma

[Music] I'm really thrilled today because what we just saw the film the imitation game starring at Benedict Cumberbatch's Alan Turing so it's a perfect timing for getting the real story about Alan Turing and what I was driving with our speaker from LAX this morning and I told him I saw the film and and said you know how'd you like it he said well it wasn't a documentary that's all I'm gonna say about it but this would not be the first time that Hollywood has taken a few liberties with stories you know so anyway professor Hodges is a tutor in mathematics at Oxford University by the way tutor there means something different than here that's in like professor and so since this book was done in 1983 it's been in print ever since multiple translations and so on he's done fundamental work in fundamental physics with Roger Penrose on in fact he works in twister string theory you know my old job and and and and the beautiful thing about this biography I mean it's a it's a magnificent biographies he really blends you know the personal life of somebody with along with mathematics and science computing war history philosophy and gay liberation movements and rights all into a single personal narrative it's a great story with that please help me welcome dr. I thank thank you very much for that introduction and it's wonderful to see so many skeptical people fantastic and I hope you'll be even more skeptical when I fish then when you begin if that's possible and also a great pleasure for me to be in Pasadena again in fact I did give a talk thirty years ago and there's someone here who remembers that which is which is very nice but a little bit worrying but anyway but so let's get going because I want to give you an informal talk about Allen's hearing about and I've given it this title about life and death because that's it is possible it's about and let's get started because here's a picture of him in 1936 when he was 24 and a very good moment to capture him that's when he just done great work in mathematics and was setting forth into the world and in fact this is a passport photograph taken for entry into the United States very appropriate but he is looking very smart in that with their collar and tie and that's not actually the picture I want to focus on so let's move on to something else but just take note of the dates there 1912 to 1954 he was died when he was not quite quite 42 so it's a short but wonderful life that we're talking about no there so people asked what was he like well there are some nice pictures to show what he was like and their school snapshot so they're not gonna be terribly clear pictures but I could emphasize that he was always seen as mr. messy and so by the standards of the 1930s all this look he looked absolutely terrible I mean these are all incredible mess and look I mean just look I mean that that's not what was approved off at all at in very old fashioned very upper-middle class very rigid very non skeptical background of his family and education which was dominated by the structure of the British Empire as it was declining in the 1920s and these are more actually and these are nice pictures were there he is in the little group of boy holiday and the south coast of England in 1931 you may see just a little bit apart from the other somehow and you can see he was not the sort of person for dressing up and and you can see this great film potential there as well and and anyway I'd like to emphasize that outdoor you know running swimming rowing and sailing were things he liked doing and were his non-scientific obvious that just just just to sort of get a picture of what he was like now these are young pictures but it was always rather a young looking guy so he always looked much younger he gave me a younger appearance than he was so that's not a bad about starting point however there's much more of course to his his life than what's on the outside and what you can't see from those pictures taken when he was 18 or 19 is something very deep that was going on within at that stage of his life he had to come through something that really well even for a young person now I'd be very very hard to deal with even with a lot of support and that is to not two things really on top of each other in in 1928-29 he found himself very attracted to this other boy Christopher Morcom at his very old-fashioned school Alan Turing had been very isolated as a budding scientific figure I mean he he was someone who could study Einstein's relativity by himself and understand it very well rather than doing the exams that he was supposed to do he had not got the idea of really sharing that or didn't really find anyone else you could share it with until he until this stage when he was 17 or so and this other boy made a great impression and so it was a scientific communication thing but of course it was perfectly clear that he was thought it was someone who was very it was a it was a romantic attraction and something ohj he must have had to deal with in and afterwards as something which was part of his homosexual identity and of course that affected the whole of his life but the thing about this young man is on here as he died very suddenly in 1930 and so Alan tiering was left with a bereavement at the age of eighteen as well as this difficulty of forming his identity in what was of course a very hostile world it does mean that foremost for the biographer or looking at his life that this is like a sort of geological fault which brought to light all sorts of things and that were going on underneath that we would never have known about her this tragedy hadn't happened for instance these pieces of school work were preserved like sacred relics by Alan and by the locum family as well who made a great thing of memorial to him and this I was just jotting this is just just jottings while they were supposed to be doing science class as bits of astronomy and generalized noughts and crosses and talk about the axioms of Euclidean geometry here and all these things are preserved in a way which we'd never have otherwise and very many other things as well but also we show from this writing where he was very open to actually a number of people that especially to Christopher's mother about how he had been attracted and what it meant to him and the grief that he'd felt but also how it had affected his scientific philosophy and this is really where his skepticism this is a very very appropriate place to bring this up because you will all understand exactly what is meant by this in a way that other people may not always see at once he was someone who would have liked to believe that there was something about the dead boy that could continue after death it would have been a wonderful thing to believe in and of course it's something that conventional people could believe in in a conventional way but he couldn't believe in that without there being some scientific basis to it conflicted with everything he knew about the material basis of science and that really affected the way he thought about the philosophy of mind and matter that's what he was drawn towards in this period greatly stimulated by the the popular rising of semi popular writing about the new physics of quantum mechanics which had appeared in the writing of Arthur Eddington in a book called the nature of the physical world which was a very well-known exposition of 1928 and which raised the possibility that maybe quantum mechanics made a difference so the traditional picture of determinism and freewill and so all these things were on the agenda and these are the things that she thought about and rose about a little bit so that we can get this this insight into his his train of thought well that's something which might not have come to anything at all except that it he the next stage took him to a very very fruitful environment in Cambridge University and it was very fortunate in this now you notice that this picture of King's College is dominated by this very large religious building of the 16th century a very very remarkable building but that gives very false impression of the nature of the environments here at Cambridge a better impression of it is given by the economist John Maynard Keynes who was a senior figure in this Cambridge College and whose moral philosophy is I think something completely in tune with what you would think of as being it is of moral skepticism it was of autonomy and thinking out moral position for oneself and not accepting any conventional views and in particular in two ways most prominence in the 1920s and 30s that is giving space to pacifism as a political position in complete contrast to the jingoism and nationalism of the First World War but also to same-sex relations as being something which is part of human life and protected in that environment and protected in a way that was very helpful for the young Alan Turing who found new friends and support of a kind that he would never have found I think anywhere else in the in the world at that at that point so that's an important aspect and I think we should feel a continuity with that were of moral and scientific skepticism that gave great strength to him at that point and which was the environment in which he very shortly produced a great work a great work of 1936 which wicious is a greatest contribution to theoretical science and he actually made very rapid progress in mathematical career and was elected a fellow of the college at a very young age but this was the the big thing that he did and I'll just say a few words about it I'm not really going to talk about his mathematical work at all you'll be glad to know but I'm asking some I'd give you some idea of of its significance and it has its word computing in it and indeed they're heading there with her own hat is the word the words computing machines but this was not anything to do with and it is now seen as the foundation of computer science it is for this paper that the equivalents of the Nobel Prize in the area of computer science is called the Turing award and it is his name flowing from this work which now becomes recognized as the mathematical foundation of that whole new engineering a scientific world but that wouldn't have been possible to see at the time and he wasn't thinking then about how to do elaborate calculations in a bigger and better or quicker way he was actually drawn to this work by something that would have seemed very abstruse and abstract and really completely pointless to walk tall but a tiny number of people it was a abstract question in the foundations of mathematics about the following question can you make absolutely precise the idea of a definite method or procedure or way of doing something in some prescribed manner or an algorithm to give a more technical name that was something that had to be decided in order to settle some really fundamental questions in the foundations of mathematics well I say there is the basic questions but the only a tiny number of people would really have seen them as very important but he did various reasons and he came up with a very strange answer and the answer we can now say we now understand very easily it's his answer was that it's anything that can be done by a computer program but that's a strange kind of answer because computers didn't exist in 1936 and in fact he had to invent the idea of the computer as we know it now a machine like the one I'm using here on which I just have to put different software to make it do different things he had to invent that idea to make sense of this idea of computing machines so the idea of the computer which he called the universal computing machine that came out I was a sort of by-product from this very abstract and philosophical work and an important connection with what I was saying earlier is this that the the focus of his attention in this paper has analyzed what the minds of a person doing an operation is what the human mind is like how can we formalize the nature of mental states and of memory but it wasn't thinking about memory or physical machines he was thinking about what human memory is like and what it would be like for a person to be doing an operation so out of this fellows this psychological analysis which certainly drew strength and drew sustenance from his thinking about the nature of the mind earlier on he arrived he brought that together with something that was in technical with in mathematics and then at the output was something which had this engineering flavor it had the flavor of actually talking about machines machines which in principle could be built and made to work and indeed we were very familiar with them now because they are the computer programs that we use all the time so that's a very that's this this is very strict on an obvious way into the whole world of computer science that he took and it came through this philosophical introduction to the subject spurred on and given greater significance by his emotional experience earlier on and indeed it must be true I think up till about 1936 that he was pretty dominated by the tragedy of his friend's death in 1930 although after this about this period I think that receded now what did you do next well he became a graduate student this is this office it seems rather the wrong way around people now and if we is to say he did this great thing and foundations of mathematics which is now the regarded as the basis of computer science and then became a graduate student that would set rather high bar for graduate school entry I think so I have to reassure prospective graduate students that this isn't the this isn't what we normally expect but but that's what he did and he came to Princeton and he did it because this work had put himself amongst the world class I mean it was little it was in it was in the in the lead and he belonged to work you long to come to a research group which was appreciate that but I'm not really going to discuss what he did he's it a PhD in Princeton but I'm going to talk about something he did on the side because that's and in fact there's a very nice picture of him here at Princeton as justice a chance snapshot taken in 1936 or 37 and he's just on the edge of the picture just by chance and you'll notice it's not actually apparently paying attention survey so the seminar that's going on and there's a rather telling he was someone who was always a bit on the edge of the main group I think that's true to say someone and you're doing his own thing and also also just looking in a slightly different different direction from other people that serves a very nice snap snapshot there now what might he have been thinking about that was in fact like his evening and weekend work well it was actually about codes and cyphers because that's going to lead us on to the next part of the story so just to remind you where we are at in 1936 he had conceived of this idea the universal computing machine where this curious word invents a single machine and that's something which we now can read as it's the idea of the computer but what do you do with that you can't build it there was no technology available then that would have been made made engineering of such a complicated idea possible but he actually connected it with something else that was amenable to some some physical engineering namely codes and ciphers he wrote about how he had been thinking thinking in this offbeat way about what would be the most general kind of code or cipher and how he discovered some new and interesting ciphers some of which would be very hard to break and that he was thinking about the significance of following this up if he sold them to His Majesty's Government well he was quite right to think about significance because he as he knew very well 1936 we're well into the era of Nazi Germany he was perfectly well aware of the course of world events there have been many distinguished refugees from Nazi Germany at Cambridge and even more at Princeton and he packed quite correctly saw that prospect of war with Germany again was for something that was all too likely so that was the that was the context in which he pursued this idea and as a sort of weekend hobby thing with a physicist friend of his he teamed up to actually to build an electric multiply which had the effect of implementing the cipher system we don't know exactly what it was but this is not the sort of thing that mathematicians are supposed to be doing it wasn't anything to do with his main graduate research it not written up it's just his own thing and it's also worth remembering that nowadays codes and ciphers are a major aspect of computer science and there are loads of textbooks and papers and conferences all the time on this subject in those days there was nothing at all there was about one article in the Encyclopedia Britannica or something like that so any thoughts he had were typically for him just his his own ideas not drawn from anyone else's ideas at all but that was actually the government very much the way he liked to work oh well I think of it talking about being what he what he was like as I'm at Caltech I can hardly not preferred to the figure of Richard Fineman who was very much of parallel kind of personality and in fact when fireman's wrote his autobiographical pieces entitled surely you're joking mr. Feynman the famous the expression was spoken by mrs. Eisenhart who ran the stuffy tea parties at Princeton graduate college the same ones that Alan Turing had been through just the year before Fryman join they were very alike I think in a plain speaking and no nonsense and no way of carrying on so that would be another way of getting a picture of what Alan Turing was like or one difference being gay of course that says that was quite a significant difference and one which certainly alienated him even more from conventional structures than Richard Feynman was but right so carry on right this led to a very striking point of the next stage namely returning to England in June 1938 bringing with him this cipher machine he was in pretty well immediately taken on to the British government cipher Department and that would have been a very natural thing to do because that king's college environments the sceptical environment if you like was actually very closely connected with the people who had been doing cipher work during the first world war in fact men are Ken's and had a apparently significant relationship with dill wind knocks who was the one of the senior Crips analysts from the first world war era and it was Knox who took on Turing in summer of 1938 and he said that he was indoctrinated into the business of codes and cyphers within the government of sphere and in fact it was as early as August 1938 that he would have been introduced this now-famous mansion I'm not sure this is going to play a part in this wonderful tour of the United Kingdom that's been on offer but I if it is if there's any possibility I would recommend that very highly because this is now a very fine exhibition and fascinating place this is now famous of course it was deadly secret until comparatively recently but this is the wartime headquarters of the British government's as a cipher Department so it had a very early introduction to this Alan Turing was essentially the first mathematical or scientific person to come into this field because the old timers like Knox had done this worked from a linguistic or textual or classical perspective and as we will see that was an out of date that couldn't cope with the demands that were being put on the on the true world level of crypto material in 1938 this is now splendid photograph which captures Alan Turing in the last week of peace in August 1938 as I said this is boating and sailing was one of his hobbies and this is what they were doing he is with another fellow of King's College a classicist his friend Fred Clayton and between them are these two these two teenage boys who they'd rescued from from Nazi Germany they'd sponsored them that is they made a partial contribution to their today emigration and and some upkeep in early 1939 and they had taken them on this on this holiday for a week at the end of August 1939 and it's certainly a striking fact that anyone passing by this scene would have had no idea what stories were wrapped up in this and this little line up here they would hardly have guests what the well it was a miser guess but but they'd heard them speaking but you would never know what terrible stories these boys are left behind and they lose their families in the in the Holocaust but they'd hardly guess that the guy in sitting in the front here would be about the most effective individual person in dealing with Nazi Germany out of the whole world scene as it stood at that point and there's a good reason for that namely the the what comes next which what is the famous Enigma machine on which German military naval military and naval communications were all in ciphered and before yeah before I go to that just remind you of some dates here but I think actually I need to hardly do that on December the 7th of all days everyone he'll be very aware of the fact that it was on that day in 1941 that the United States well in fact it's the day on which Japan and and immediately afterwards Germany declared war on the United States which came into became a world war but of course the European war began rather earlier in September 1939 when Germany launched war on Poland and then Britain and France came into it and I'll just remind you that in 1940 Germany defeated France as it had not been able to do in the First World War and Britain and the British Commonwealth were comparing really essentially isolated in 1940 and the most part of 1941 and there's a crucial part of that is that it really very much depended on British naval forces to maintain British independence that's just from the very island nature of the geography that's the situation it's in this window of 1940 the Alan Turing's individual contribution is most striking and that's partial pay attention to and again if you saw this is Alan Turing and his mother's garden in 1939 and looking a bit more respectable they're more like the way she would have liked to have seen him I think with a tie and this sort of thing and but he would never guess that he was the person who was likely to be doing that and indeed had probably been inducted into these secret stuff at their highest level already at the time of that boating holiday in 1939 well this is the machine on which everything revolved the Enigma machine and again I'm not going to try and explain how it works except to make it obvious that it was it has a reasonable amount of complication in it with rotors which turned here and changed the way that any letter output letter depended on the input I mean type it on it like a typewriter but what comes out is not what you put in and the way it differs is something it depends crucially not on the position of these rotors but also on lots of plugging between these which goes on at the front here and that's actually the biggest part of the problems all this all this stuff on the front what is important to know is that it was used so universally by the German services so that if you've got a handle on it you've got a you got something which address a great swathe of military and naval material later in the war they made use of another type of cipher machine completely different for the highest level of Hitler's messages and so forth about I won't say anything about that but other for the most most of what was going on it was this machine was used for everything and the Brits and the French for that matter well I've got no ever this there were simpler versions of the machine which didn't have this stuff on the front they could cope with that that was comparatively easy but this had defeated them it essentially has a more mathematical structure to it and but the breakthrough was in July 1939 when Poland which had been given a guarantee by Britain and France that Britain and France would come into the war of Germany attacked Poland in response Poland gave a terrific amount of information to the British and French governments of their knowledge of the internal goings-on inside this machine which the British lacked and also some very creative ideas Madame ideas about how to how to break it that is to say how to find out the settings of the machine when you're not the intended receiver of the message and that was taken up with extreme rapidity by the new British Department I think I'd just like to emphasize that the things moves extra amazingly quickly considering that it was really quite an old-fashioned Department which hadn't changed very much since the first world war but Alan theory coming into it followed by another mathematical appointment early in 1939 and then a whole cohort of mathematical people from Cambridge in September 1939 completely changed the picture very very quickly just a bit of geography there going on there if you ever went there on r2 you'd see these places now this is the building where Alan Turing works at the beginning of the war and September 1939 with these colleagues and this is the pub in the know but neighboring village where he lived all these all the people working there from Cambridge and Oxford a lot of them I just lived in local villages and cycled in and in and out that's how they carried on now what's striking about the story here is this very very early date this is only a couple of months after the opening of hostilities and already the influence of Turing's ideas is here because you see we talk about solving a solution of the Enigma and a machine now being made Letchworth is actually the factory of the British subsidiary of IBM where they were had high grade worker and mechanical calculators about of that era was was going but what they had in mind was something not like anything that had been built before it was something we should have a strange name for the superbomb machine and the strange world bomb there's nothing to do with explosives except in literary allusion it's because they polish analysts had invented a type of machine a very restricted form of the Enigma problem caught which they called for reason there's no one really knows why a bomb and it's this name stuck so the British Colbert machine a bomb and the when I come to it later the United States machines were also called bombs and this here you see this this is these are the leading people that's Alan Turing and that was his mathematical collaborator Gordon welchman was very important that's another mathematical guy Peter twin who came on came in before the war started and that's the old-timer deal win Knox who come round to this very very rapidly may not have liked it at first but the polls have shown that this was the way to go and it is in a way I mean this was a scientific revolution this was like the 17th century pushed into a couple of months that was the effect of it this was the effect of using an analysis and algebra and concepts from modern mathematics to make sense of how you could break into the messages in a very effective way but it has to be coupled with innovative engineering as well and it was helpful for that reason that Alan Turing was someone who had this combination of pure mathematics but also as with his sniper multiplier built at Princeton had this urge to actually see things done in practice something is very unusual for a mathematician in that period or now for that matter right right now okay so this was the Machine this is a picture of the machine that they built and the Turing bomb and it was working delivered and working in march 1940 I mean that's very striking that's before the European war really got going as before Churchill became prime minister this is amazingly quick work and oh well how can I describe how it works you what you see on the outside yeah are actually 36 copies of an Enigma machine and that allows the input of 36 guests letters of do you're faced with a lot of ciphers x-men which doesn't mean anything that's all just loads of X's and Q's and Ailes names and it many old thing but with acquaintances where the traffic will allow you to guess what some bit of that message is actually in ciphering it might be a standard opening that applies to all the messages coming from some particular radio operator that you know about and that outside of the Machine allow it has enough room to allow you to input that information have a guess of about up to 36 letters 20 odd which would do what you so that's it it's like entering something into a Google search box you see that's a idea and then but what's clever just as with Google it isn't entering the stuff in the boxes clever it's what's going on inside Google that counts and what was going on inside here was something where you can't see which is a very clever piece of logic embodies in electrical circuitry at which this is tearing zone diagram and in the report that he wrote up in 1940 and it's written as a picture and the things that you see in the pictures these legs their lines here they are they are logical implications each line in here is saying if something is true here then something else is true here and then something else is true there and something else is true there and when there's a loop as there is here it has the potential for leading to a contradiction to your first idea and if you get a contradiction that means that the idea must be wrong and then you move on to the next possibility and that so it was a very very beautiful idea nowadays people who want to do that in computer software then remember there weren't any computers you had to use something extremely ingenious and this was it it wasn't Turing's alone his collaborator Gordon welchman made it a very important contribution but this ever less got everything going in the spring of 1940 was that the solution of the Enigma certainly not that was just the start now you had a way of industrializing the production of enigma incitements if you could get this business of guessing a sequence of letter it's got a long sequence of letters for some some message that you received but you needed to have much more to get a better acquaintance with the message structure they had to break the messages by other means and gradually build up an understanding of them of the structure of the messages so that you could then apply this industrialized methods so the loads of things going on during this early period in ninety and also the scale of it's important there wasn't just one in e-commerce system there are hundreds of different enigma systems all using different variants and different tricks and different systems for communicating between sender and receiver all of those had to be looked at and all the different and thousands of messages coming out not just the question of like breaking one secret message but doing something it would systematically get hold of the entire traffic as much at least as much as you possibly could so loads of things going on one interesting bit is that early nineteen forty Turing was on an important mission to France where they collaborated with the French and the Polish analysts who made the breakthrough on these other methods for getting into the Enigma but after that during took over and specialized and looked at what was the most difficult but also the most important of the Enigma message systems that is the naval enigma messages naval warfare necessarily to turn turns very acutely on information it depends on orders to be sent and reports to be sent back with exact positions and data about other ships and other submarines and so forth and without its you can't operate at all so that was the most important but it was also the most difficult because the naval the German Navy guarded their enigma messages by the equivalent of an extra password system something you had a hack into on top of all the difficulty with the machine that I've described that was Turing's problem that was the way he made the most individual contribution in the winter of 1939 1940 because he cracked the question of how this password system worked and to my dears for how to attack it with advanced ideas and statistics but he couldn't make any progress until the Navy the British Navy had managed to make a capture of the codebook containing this password system so you knew exactly exactly what the passwords were have you like and that didn't happen until February 1941 there's very frustrating wait there there's a fascinating story of how the commander Ian Fleming who later became very well known as the writer of some rather fantastic novels was was a naval commander and plotted a particular capture in September 1940 and Turing was very upset that they weren't able to carry this off it didn't didn't come off they had to wait a bit longer meanwhile they as it was successful in 41 then they made rapid progress and at that point it also recruited more people came into it and I just emphasized the elements of diversity that entered into the this naval enigma business Jack good for instance was not at all from the English upper class background that you might have associated with what I've been describing so far he was second-generation Polish Jewish from a quite different London background and Joan Clough I was very I mean she was a woman very much in a minority she was then a fourth-year mathematics student at Cambridge just finishing her master's level and she was a students of Gordon Welshman who whom I've already described as cheering's main collaborator on the on the Enigma breaking business and she came in an early point and she became a great buddy of Alan Turing's in 1941 and indeed they were very friendly and they liked a lot doing a lot of things together and rather to her surprise he did propose a marriage in early 1941 and then immediately said the next day that it wouldn't work he had homosexual tendencies and this this was not really for him they let it linger run for a number of months and carried on with a lot of cycle rides and walks and talk about maths and visits the cinema and so forth but in fact he he broke it off it clear it wasn't wasn't going to work later in 1941 and this was a serious thing in his I mean serious thing for her of course too but for him it was certainly burning a bridge many gay men of that period as men are Ken's himself one might suggest had it could do this kind of marriage as a cover or a way of conforming with with social convention and make the best of it he would not have been at all unusual in doing that but that wasn't for him he had this plate and had this direct and honest and modern minded approach to life which didn't allow for that when he broke it off it was actually with quite a significant expression he quoted the words of Oscar Wilde from The Ballad of rock reading jail for each man kills the thing he loves and so on it was quite a important moral decision that he made and they remained friendly on the basis that they understood what was involved in this and it was not it was upsetting but not it was it had a link as well as separating them very largely thereafter now that was all taking place at the very same time as this exciting work on mastering the German u-boat and other and surfers vessel system and which was going extremely well and making a very big difference to the early war of the Atlantic however in February 1942 disaster struck because the Atlantic u-boats which were the most important part of the German naval effort the very vessels which threatened to cut off the United Kingdom from the rest of the world they went on to a new type of enigma machine in which there are one two three four rotors going round and there's a tiny technical change but the combinatorics of it justice just the numbers just the number of possibilities increased by that certain amount which meant that what had been just possible with a three motor machine was now impossible and it's a fluke really that the numbers and the available technology just made the breaking of the ordinary enigma possible at all and to make it essentially like a hundred times more complicated pushed it completely over the edge so they were stuck before where before they've had the equivalent of a newspaper filled every day with report detailed reports of their author u-boat orders and positions and sightings and so forth they had nothing and said that was absolutely major catastrophe but of course it also happens at the same time as the United States had come fully into the Second World War and indeed American ships and American coastal traffic were at great risk from from u-boats I mean this is the time when the East Coast of the United States was blacked out this was this was a very very serious matter now though to this set in motion to two things of great importance first of all electronics came into the technology for the first time the machines I've described so far had moving parts rather like the parts of the automatic telephone exchanges which were built in their late 1930s but electronic speeds in principle could be a thousand times faster but that was completely untried in new technology which no one knew very much about the other development was that there had to be cooperation with the United States and it was that which brought Alan Turing into the next stage was that he became the top-level liaison between the British effort as I've described it and the demands of the US Navy I mean the demands of the US Navy were pretty stringent I mean they really wanted to get control of the entire business that was going on which they had been rather kept in the dark about until until end of 1941 and this involved Alan Turing crossing the Atlantic himself at the high the u-boat threat and arriving in New York where rather typically for him and his life he was kept on Ellis Island because no one knew who he was as I'm indicated the way he looked didn't somehow signal hid that he was the chief and most important person in the in the British communications business and he'd been told not to take any papers with him on the boat he didn't and so as a result there was no way he could establish that he was anything at all when he arrived so he was kept on Ellis Island who were very snooty about my carrying no orders and no evidence to connect me with a foreign office it might have been better from a security point of view if I had been provided with some kind of documents of the kind they wanted I've quoted some text there so you get a little flavor of his writing and also it's very much the way he spoke I mean he wrote as he spoke very very directly anyway they did let him in after some frantic telegrams from the White House or something and he got to Washington on November the 17th 1942 he was not at all impressed with what was going on there but it must be said that the whole departments the the the his opposite numbers in the United States Nova scripts analytic business was I mean it was rapidly gaining in par with hype new recruits and high-powered people coming into it so before very long it was working closely with the British people at the same level but at this point he said his typical he was astonished to find they would make these elaborate calculations before they had really grasps the main principles of the thing there's a very typical Turing expression he wasn't he didn't like getting into all sorts of grimy calculations for the sake of it it was always establishing main principle and theory and before you got into the practice that was his thing and this is a picture of the of a different type of bomb machine that was being built by the United States very rapidly in the winter of 1942 1943 they the u.s. set out to make a hundred of these very rapidly something that was far beyond the capacity of British industry at that point the Brits actually built about 200 by the end of the war but this they they couldn't have taken on this number as well and Turing's firm the steering never got to California but the nearest the furthest west he got was Dayton Ohio and that was where the National cash registers factory was taken over for this very totally top-secret industry which unknown to almost anyone else in the world was actually playing a vital part in the Battle of the Atlantic and that's where these were being being built so that actually also set in motion the next stage of things which is during exposure to electronics because the United States was building a top level speech scrambler system a very advanced electronic design and but very complicated as well and that was to be used for the high-level conversations between President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill and so forth so where it was absolutely essential that radio telephone messages could not be deciphered by the by the German side that's I mean that's not at all easy to do and it's something which which absolutely depends on electronic speeds a terrible again oh this was being done at Bell Laboratories in New York at this time West Street New York typical again no arrangements have been made for him to what he was allowed to see no clearances had been done properly I had there been an understanding which then broke down he found it useful to drop the fact that he had a Princeton PhD so he went by the name of dr. Turing was it I mean that's a just the little sort of detail that makes you feel there's something actually quite typically making humor out of this weird situations he was in that I mean that was what he was like about that even that didn't work though because it still had the problem that he hadn't been properly cleared all that was sorted out but after a lot of very awkward stuff it should be said that sorting that out establish the infrastructure the technical basis for us UK collaboration which was embodied in treaties the following year in 1943 and really became the foundation of the well is the whole NSA GCHQ collaboration which you may have seen described in newspapers over the past year or so and and as such has been a most important though extremely little known aspect of the whole post-war world I mean that really was he was the guy who actually set up this first working basis of it another person is very important was Claude Shannon who is very famous as the founder of communication or information theory he was also working on the same stuff and that's where they met in Bell Laboratories in 1943 it's where you get the first talk by Alan Turing and Claude Shannon together about the prospects for artificial intelligence as we call it now well they talked about building a brain they all talked in this way went straight to the heart of it as just as in those early talk about as I showed you in its earliest thoughts about the mind and philosophy of mind he was that was his fundamental interest what would having high-speed computing do for understanding the human mind could you rival what the human mind does by what we'd now think I was as computer embodying artificial intelligence programs and very nice story this is just anecdote here what he's like he was overheard in the cafeteria at Bell Laboratories in saying I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain all I'm after is a mediocre brain like the presidents of the Americans telephone and telegraph company I think even in the even in the refined environment of the Googleplex or LA I think you would find people a little bit wary of making remarks of that nature and anyway in the American corporate structure of 1940s that was certainly that struck a very curious note indeed but that that was what he was like all right well that's just a few anecdotes in there so now this was all just the run-up for Alan Turing's assault on what we've now called the computer revolution of the post-war period because putting all this stuff together he was the one person really you've had a handle on all the three main ingredients you needed to do and indeed motivate what we'd now think of was the computer and everything you do with a computer he had the idea of pure theory of the universal machine he had the motivation from the hundreds of different methods which had to be embodied in different special procedures and different engineering for different machines in the code-breaking business and now he had the electronic technology with its speed that was demonstrated in what he's seen in the United States it was demonstrated again by this very advanced machinery that was being built at Bletchley Park and it was demonstrated in his own thing which was his own tiny little speech and cybermen system which he reckon was a lot more sophisticated than the United States effort although it didn't have the same weight as I mean it wasn't really the same sort of thing but the thing was it was his own system his own theory and embodied with engineering with his own hands or rather the hands of a young electronic engineer Donald Bailey whom I must say was very surprised to have Alan Turing telling him how he was gay and how interesting this was and and so forth this was not the sort of thing that left tenants in the in the British Army actually expected in 1944 but Alan Turing was like that he was very open when when his sense that there was had a good something he wants it to be and it's generally speaking he liked people to know if he had any serious contact with them and he coming out to other people was important part of his sense of identity and more so I think when he put the question of the conventional marriage behind him he became much more clear that this was what it was like and he should and go for it so that was that was the background now to what happened after the Second World War or just as the war was closing in 1945 this was Alan Turing's launch of the computer revolution with a detailed design for Alek electronic computer in the modern sense could finished in March 1946 and adopted by the British government it wasn't that it was shelved or disregarded it was taken on in the premier government laboratory of the time however that's slightly just as with showing a picture of the bomb is rather misleading the show a picture of lots of hardware stuff because that is not really what's important what's important of the ideas inside it which you can't see but those ideas were of modern programming and software developments the idea of the enormous range of different things that which a single machine could do something we now take for granted but then very strange indeed and also the advanced idea is that the machine itself could be translating programs from one language to another language that went well beyond what was going on in parallel developments elsewhere the computer it's a long story short it didn't proceed as he would have liked I mean the enormous success of building the Enigma breaking bombs in 1940 would have given him a rather rosy idea of what could be expected of a big project like this in practice and in peacetime conditions you couldn't get the ideas and the technology all under his own control every had to be done by different kinds of people it took and and traditional methods of organization it didn't didn't work maybe we did work it wasn't terrible and a machine was built based on these ideas in 1950 but that was much too slow for his his ideas he he was fast actually actually saying he star sister is actually quite literally true because at the same point he became extremely keen on amateur athletics and became a a champion long-distance runner and joins a local club which I'll show you in a minute and that's him running and a nice story about this is that what is the following and that there's obviously a question about who was first with the idea of computer was its hearing or was it John von Neumann and the engineers associated with the edvac in in the United States in in in the summer of 1945 I mean they're essentially parallel there's a lot of difficult questions about how much von Neumann could have got from knowing tearing and Turing's ideas before the war but there's virtually no information there's no actual documents which really explain this tearing himself and phenomena no matter he didn't seem at all concerned about establishing priority though a lot of people worried about it during this part I know never made a clear statement about this he just referred to his earlier work on Universal machine ideas but in a somewhat vague way and one thing is he could never have explained how he put the universal machine idea together with electronic technology because everything he'd done with it technology was completely secret and no one outside the tiny number of people indoctrinated into it could possibly be told anything about it so he really had his hands tied behind his back in that way and couldn't couldn't make any didn't try though the only person I know who really put it to him dr. Turing you're the guy behind this electronic brain aren't you is the sports reporter of the evening news as London evening newspaper who did ask this on December 26 1946 and Turing gave a reply said oh well no sort of self self-deprecating reply but adding hmm the Americans had done the donkey work and that's a slightly edgy way to refer to the work of John von Neumann and the American and developments but that again is little a little bit of flavor of a of the way he spoke and actually went quite deep I think he was a bit of a contradiction because he was quite self-deprecating and never pushed himself as the great figure behind all of this he didn't write down all that he knew and make it to the scientific public but on the other hand he did actually think of himself as rather important as having the big idea behind it all and tended to get rather annoyed that that wasn't recognized but didn't do the things which would have made it recognized I think that was a problem for him that's just a nice picture of of his running Club and that's an entire and getting onto the bus going off to a meeting and their notice again it's just a little he's in the group but not quite of the group that would be quite typical look I think but his actual time was very good and so he was a very valued member of the club right so he went off in 1948 to Manchester University where electronic engineers had taken a completely different approach to getting a computer going it wasn't meant to be useful it was just meant to something that would demonstrate the idea of the what we now call stored-program and that was working very early in June 1948 when Sharon got there he found he couldn't really again he wasn't really in charge of anything and he rather dropped computers developments he didn't do any software development really either nothing very very impressive he moved to other typically he just moved sideways since doing other things have his own thing and one of them was his developing the ideas of artificial intelligence and this paper written in 1950 with the title Computing Machinery and intelligence and which contained the famous imitation game idea that was the philosophical paper but with lots of technical ideas and lots of mathematical analysis of what it meant to be thinking about computers as the embodiment of something which could in principle embody intelligence and it was technical but it was also very human I mean in a way the subtext of it is he's saying I know what human intelligence is about and I know what human life is about is very very different from other things written in that period and it has a lot of his own personality in it and so it actually has a double meaning in this in this writing that he's saying I'm not just thinking about intelligence as being doing clever calculations it actually means being able to understand a joke for instance that's what it's all about and that's him at that period and this is at the console of the machine which was built in 1951 as the more commercial device and he likes saying he like he didn't mind calling it electronic brain the way that the newspapers called it and reflecting the fact that he had this serious interest in whether a machine could rival the brain or not and he made himself really one of the world's first well he was on first world's first computer users but also the world's first personal computer users because it was a one-to-one thing in those days if you had access to it at all you handled it yourself and he very much likes doing that this expression I work on the electronic brain was also his chess up line and that is distinguished for in for initiating one of the world's most disastrous Affairs when he met a young man not far from Manchester University in the sort of gay pickup area that was in downtown Manchester and this I will leave the I won't go through the details of this there's no time that they've been they are it describes in my my there interesting because tearing himself took a lot of interest in what happened and in the nature of this young man and he's working-class background and it was very unfortunate affair and it led to this disastrous things where he was prosecuted found out by the police at this time all go sex was illegal and anything which brought it to the attention of the police typically something going wrong through a petty crime or an attempted blackmail would be prosecuted without mercy and indeed that's is what happened and he they both in fact were on trial on the 31st of March 1952 and this gave rise to sequence of humiliations of which they've just one was being headlined in the local newspaper in these terms there cannot be many newspaper accounts which combine the words most profound and original mathematical minds of his generation with the words put on probation or indeed with the words to have Organo therapy treatment which was the fancy term used by the medical profession in those days for what was considered the most enlightened and scientific and liberal alternative to prison name an injection with estrogen with the aim of eliminating sexual desire it didn't work but that nevertheless was still very distressing the things are happened to anyone but he typically put a brave face on it and certainly never apologized and indeed have made a big point to the police of not apologizing and in giving them a statement which contains no elements of contrition or regret whatever for what had taken place his watchword was really a defiance humor and this comes out in this little triplet of lines that he wrote for a gay friend of his in 1952 it's a silly it's a form of a syllogism and it wraps up as of course I've tried to do in writing about him the way that he combines so many aspects of his life and thought in a way that they all just come together it's tearing beliefs machines think during lies with men therefore machines do not think I mean it's a crazy logic of course and it's a reference to the formal logic that goes back to the Middle Ages when logic was it was invented it means pseudo deductions it has a play on the word word play on the word lies that's the biblical word for in the book of Deuteronomy or whatever but of course it has a double meaning and he himself had lied to the police when standing up to the effective blackmail he had given them a fib about how he knew the actual identity of someone who robbed his house anyway but of course it's tied in with his what he called being Ben being in a position of a heretic in believing in the possibility of machine intelligence so it links the idea of being a heretic with the idea of being a sexually someone outside the outside the frame as well his reaction in fact essentially was one of defiance namely to go abroad get out of England whether so the law didn't apply and at some point he heard about the new gay organization and that it started in Scandinavia in 1948 and he zipped off to Norway in the summer of 1952 and that's the significant part that's a photograph from a Danish magazine of the time very very this is all twenty years ahead of what happened in the you know the later 20th century the others just as important or breaths just in parallel obviously absolutely refused to give up on serious scientific work so that his work on his new theory of mathematical biology went ahead absolutely Full Tilt's these are printouts and the computer but done up as drawings he had a new theory of growth and form of biological entities which really only now only now in the 2010s is being put to experimental tests actual physical chemical mechanisms it didn't really get going until the 1990s and only now is it is it is it really this is now hot stuff so this is not something I may look funny but this was absolutely at the center of scientific thought now so just to emphasize these dates again here actually the truck because they often give rise to confusion the trial that this happened in March 1952 and the probation went on for another year until March 1953 but he didn't die until June 1954 and there's a whole story of things which happened in that last period which is that in a way the most extraordinary of the lot and may I'm not I'm just going to throw various things at you here this was a real drama I say of life and death quite literally because it ended with his death but he was working on a mathematical theory essentially what his life in really as the parallel to the the elucidation of DNA structure which was going on at the same time it's it's not the same thing that's trying to find out DNA structure or genetic structure is finding out what happens when the proteins that are coded by the DNA float around and how they could possibly give rise to biological forms it's a it's a complimentary question that it was self the same degree of scientific fundamental quality but the point I have here is that he in his pursuit of life and certainly of individual life for himself as well as life in the biological very sense he was in a very strange position indeed because he was not free to be an exploratory individual as others tried to be in that period he he was unique in that he held in his MA in his brain these top secrets from the Second World War and indeed further material gained when he did work for GCHQ from 1948 until it was stopped at when he was found out and arrested in 1952 these were absolutely absolute Sebu things I mean no hints of the Second World War k work came out until the mid 1970s this was the peak of the Cold War paranoid period this was the period after British spies Burgess and MacLean had defected to the Soviet Union in July 1951 this I cannot think of anything he could have done that was more provocative than going to the island of Corfu in Greece in the summer of 1953 I mean here it is and just across the Iron Curtain there is that is the ALP is Albania had already been daring to spy things going on in here is only just after the Greek Civil War this would be even today someone who was the top consultant to a secret government department would be ill-advised to spend their holidays in such a on a location so so close to the fracture zones of the modern world and in that point it's heart is amazing that he was allowed to do it at all and it wouldn't I think is extremely likely that it couldn't do anything like that ever again he certainly roamed around and met I don't know how many young men which is something he certainly liked doing in France and in Greece and in Norway in fact they've been a big fuss in March 1953 when a young man he'd met in Norway on the previous summer tried to visit him in his home near Manchester and was was intercepted by the police during describes it as a police operation going on all over the north of England to find him and send him back this was obviously a state security question that he was in here I think he was very reluctant to see that this was the case but his hints and his letters show that this this must have been the issue and that his will he made in February 1954 and I don't think in the projection you'll be able to see any of the wording there but I can tell you it's a very extraordinary well very very deliberate very unusual and individual he ignored all the conventions of family structure and he divided his estate between five and the five people were the five people really who'd given him maximum support as a gay man damn is he one of them was his boyfriend Neville Johnson who whom he'd seen between 1948 and 1951 but as a long-distance relationship because their jobs took them apart and then it had been broken up by the disaster in the arrest in 1952 and another was the very important and close gay friends Nicholas fur bank who later became the biographer of e/m Forester and a well-known literary figure and critic and who died earlier this year and the other two what I won't go through the more beau miss mentioned the fifth one was in fact his mother and that was a very very individual Turing touch that by lumping his mother in with his gay friends wishes something that absolutely horrified his family and probably his mother of course that was a far greater tribute to her as a real person and the way that she had reacted after 1952 than any conventional and of family estate thing would have ever have done so that was certainly a very deliberate choice then and my now it does seem quite clear to me that he had a plan for suicide all the way along he had a depressed period in 1937 wouldn't have been anything to do with this kind of situation but just to do with the difficulty of being a young mat game man in Princeton away from the supportive environments in Cambridge and what on earth to do about it how on earth to live a decent honest and satisfying life in those circumstances I mean it's surprising and it's not surprising that he would have thought of the suicide it's more surprising anyone didn't think of suicide quite honestly such a terrible situation to be in and it's certainly that plan involves an Apple and electrical wiring and the point of the plan would be to disguise suicide by poison as a chemical experiment one a home fun experiment going wrong just the kind of thing his mother always feared it's just the sort of thing she always nags him about it must be careful there and indeed that's what he did he had such a plan and he carried out and indeed she did take it as an accident and I'm sure that was intended as a kindness to her and to anyone else who wanted to believe that it was an accident the poison was in fact cyanide which is very very rapidly acting is a classic poison of the 1940s and the Apple well I mean the the practical aspect of it was that he he he often as an Apple at that point and that was part of the reason why it could be taken to be an accident but after he thought of a famous scene in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1938 it must have taken a greater iconic significance and that we know that he did we know that he did because another amazing story is that he had a running partner in 1951 he and the running partner was a 17-year old high school student called Alan garner Alan garner Leigh became very famous as and as a novelist he wrote a book called the owl service which is one of the most well known this is a youth fiction of the 1960s and they just read it was just simply running training which they did together about two or three evenings a week throughout 51 early 52 and during this the course of this their chat on this and that not all that much but at one point it came out in their conversation that both of them had been absolutely struck by the famous poisoned Apple seen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Alan Garner's described this and said how Alan Turing describes its iconic significance of life and death of course it's actually more than that it has these out other echoes of a sleeping death which isn't actually a death at all and it's it's thrown open to us as to what we'd make make off it but certainly there was something there and that is indeed anyway they've background to his being found dead of cyanide poisoning with an apple by a partly eaten apple by his bedside on he is found on the 8th of June 1954 and the death was put on thee as on the previous day it was the Monday of a holiday weekend which was the wettest and coldest for 50 years it was an absolutely miserable weekend it was also the 10th anniversary of DJ which might in think might well have made him reflect on the poor recompense he'd received for what had actually been very decisive work on the securing the Allied communications and the Atlantic in preparation for that event and well that's how he went and of course it is an amazing coincidence in this pure coincidence the iconic bitten apple with its rainbow colors turned out to be the logo of a well known a computer company this is entirely coincidental but it is one of those resonance icons which somehow make his life and death something extra-special which and I think isn't not going to go away but it's something where everyone is invited to find their own significance and their own reading and their own understanding of what significance in life and death and that's where I'd like to throw it open to that was a great story beautiful story as we have a few minutes of questions before we'll do the book signing so we'll start up right here yes I have two questions that they work with regard whatever to say about finding your own significance I was wondering if you're familiar with the small independent operated documentary gumball top-secret Rosie's the women female computer the few female programmers of world war ii and this story about the animal programming these ladies mathematician and then at the end of the war of course they were told well go home big cookies leads to the premise of the Bletchley Circle and the second one was there's a story with the naval machine that at one time is sent the same man twice without me send a meal that's what right question one the answer is no I didn't know that but of course what it is is I what is representative of is an entire generation that had wartime experiences that were miles ahead of what they encountered in speech in peacetime there were people of different backgrounds who were brought into exciting work they've never have done in in peacetime that it was all hushed up afterwards and so forth I mean it was Alan Turing was not alone in this sea he was it was just an extreme example of what the whole generation in many cases experienced on the second question what you have is or in what you say is almost correct but it wasn't anything to do with the Enigma that was to do with the other type of cipher machine that I haven't said anything about called the Lorentz machine which was a teleprinter based thing it didn't work on the 26 letters of the alphabet it worked on the 32 characters of the teleprinter code and it's a completely different a type of machine and that was the machine which was was broken by this go backwards yes by by this machine the Colossus machine at the top here so that the incident you described which was in August 1941 was when as the German operator sent a message or didn't send you exactly the same on the same settings well that wouldn't have given any information at all but sent almost the same message on the same settings so it was just displaced by one or two characters and that enables you to tease out the ones who guessed that someone very brilliant did guess that that was the case and they were able to tease out to the internal nature of the lorentz machine which I haven't got a picture of here and and from that it was possible to work out its entire internal structure without ever capturing one of the machines yeah so that was that was an enormous strife that wasn't tearing thing that was other people cheering came into that and his statistical theory which he developed for naval enigma was then brought into the theory behind the use of these machines so he had a big theoretical part in it but he didn't do that so much of the hands-on work for it but what you say is right and actually exemplifies another thing I think which is a is the role of individual events in history as a fascinating subject altogether I mean some things are just broad sweep of history and they're just career along and individuals just take their part in the great stream of events and then sometimes one individual events can make tremendous difference to the outcome very very critical and in wartime that can happen because you can say that in the long run the Enigma would have been broken but they didn't have a long run it had a very very short run and he had to be done for the naval enigma it really had to be done in 1940-41 or else that had been too late because the enhancement in 1942 would have made it too difficult and Turing actually by giving his undivided attention to that problem at a he actually said I liked having this problem because no one else was doing anything about it and I could have it to myself and we no one stopped him doing or opposed it or anything but it was a very autonomous decision to concentrate on something which seemed too difficult whereas you could have just said well we better concentrate on the bits we can do first and then leave this to later I mean he he went for the the hardest bit and the guy who figured out the thing that you've said brought out that was a similar thing that was a very chance event and it was someone's individual decision to have a go at it and persist with this over quite a long time till figuring it out which made a huge difference because then these machines actually did decipher Hitler's personal messages in the run-up to z-day and thereafter so there's a very very fascinating historical questions here about the role of individual people yeah is that it was someone like to chair Michael would you it's difficult for me to choose I think you'll be better review if you Lexa's yes ah this is an exercise left to the reader I'm not going to speak that's just too much getting into their eye I just feel that yeah no I'm not gonna I'm not going to go there I mean there's matters there's so many different topics here and it's all open now I'm he's opening my book is they'll have our website and the website had links to all the original documents have you interested in earrings death you can see the post mortem online these are now accessible things through the computer which is great so I really invite people to look at it from that point of view it's not my story it's a there's a historical story which is open for all to skeptically investigate I think I said I might just say I would encourage skepticism yes a retired military officer was there well the family background as I said I just skipped over was a very traditional British Empire background actually the same as George Orwell and is it's quite an interesting parallel figure actually came from the same class and same British India background so yes because it's parents were being in civil servants in I was father was the civil servants and his wife was the dutiful wife of those days in British India the thing was for the the offspring to be educated back in England without very much parental contact Minister would now be thought of as insupportable but that's what they did and it was a great thing in those days you did the thing that had to be done and there was no choice about it well so the lady's asking is was there anything particular about the foster parents essentially well I described that period in my book I wouldn't say there's anything which says that makes that period you can see what was going to happen because of something that happened during that period I would say looking at his there are very there are interesting things in his childhood no no question of that and the fact that he studied are in science relativities at sixteen is M that you can get you can read it online you can see the document yourself you don't have to take it from me is all these things are marvelously available and he really was special in that way I think I'd point to most always when he was 11 or 12 he had a letter in which he said I seem to be always thinking about what is most common in nature and doing things were the least waste of energy I can't mean I was exactly right there but that is he is someone at that age who's not only thinking about the nature of scientific principle and but seeing that he has that that that character you see I mean it's not only doing something which is looking at fundamental principles of what's going on in science which indeed is what he did the whole of his life but can see himself from the outside and see that something about himself that can be expressed I mean he was very expressive like that I don't feel that he was it was someone who was greatly harmed if that's what you're getting at by the background he was very very tough on these in these and these matters and it's hard to tease those puzzle berries that's very good point yeah do you know if Turing was inspired right so that's that's a very good question about the question with a relationship with Charles Babbage and the analytical engine of the 1830s of course it's never built but the plans for it well well well that articulated the answer would be I think that he knew nothing about that at the time of doing the 1936 work and buy and probably not at any time shortly thereafter by the period of the second world war when around the high level of people around this machine and there's operations they knew about Babbage's work and there was some talk about it so he would be familiar then and he would have been familiar with the other big calculators which were currents in in Britain and the United States which were basically developments of Babbage's ideas so he had rolls of tape in various ways which made arithmetic operations happen now the thing is it's always been difficult this Babbage certainly had the vision which is 100 years ahead of his time and had a vision of doing many many different things with the analytical engine but he didn't have a theory of why it would actually be he didn't call it universal and it would have had no theory which justified calling it universal and also but on a practical level it didn't have what the universal machine has which is the idea that you put that the instructions are no different from from the data that when you've got as a program you imagine it doesn't matter that it's a program it's just a string of symbols so the symbol of our standing of a program that they could equally well stand for numbers bamboo juice machine and all the others that follow different ears are completely different from that he thought of the instructions there on his loom cards and they use paper tape and things later on but the numbers are stored on cog wheels and so are they were completely different you couldn't transfer from one to the other whereas insurance 1936 work is actually vital to the theory the whole point of his what he calls inventing the universal machine is that the instructions that form a data structure just like any other data they're no different and you use that every time you download an app onto her onto a cell phone you're using the fact that the instructions which make the app are no difference in nature from the bottle from the bits which make up a telephone message they're just the same kind so Turing had that and it really is different from what Babbage did but I must say no one must have be clear about that hearing himself didn't make that distinction clear cheering the refer to Babbage's machine as as being universal which I think it was simply wrong I mean I don't think he looked at the history seriously and other people have done that as well and there are very artificial ways of saying you could connect up Babbage's machine in a way which makes it you know but that it really goes against the whole principle of the thing I mean we're in steering's what he called a practical Universal confusing machine because the word computer hadn't come into use until later and though about the 50s it really embodied the whole idea of the universal machine in a way that Babbage is certainly didn't I mean that's that's a whole interesting subject in scientific history but I think the main thing is during thing was autonomous it really just was his own thing quite honestly yeah also organizing in Germany before the bar here in Los Angeles no I don't know I'd love to know I don't know and I do know he he he certainly had a he read two important gay novels of the 1951 period Katra foil and Finisterre which were of that exactly of that of that period and so he he may well have caught some currents but it was the it was on the whole I mean he just liked the he liked traveling in Europe anyway basically and and he was a I think attracted he certainly toyed with the idea whether he he'd go and I moved to Scandinavia I mean he was certainly took it very seriously [Music] well I think I've shown you what tearing actually did in this in the in the latter part of the war and there are several things first of all there was not a moment when the enigma was though I don't know where to start on this really there wasn't a single moment when the Enigma was broken and everything became clear as I said that was just the beginning you know all these different systems had had their own problems and there are various different breakthroughs and I've shown you what actually Turing did in the latter part of the war there was the period of the naval enigma breakdown the period has been going lazing with the United States on the technical level of the Enigma code breaking and then his introduction to electronic speech scrambling and his consultancy for all elements of the crypto work and then his building his own speech and siphon system and those are the things he did oh well of course ah well all right yes I thought I could have yeah all right I say a little bit more about that yeah at the point when I say that was just the beginning all right I've only spoken talking here about the the elements that cheering was directly involves in which was the breaking of the messages he worked in hut 8 which did be breaking of the naval messages next to hurt 8 was hot for Hut 4 was not mathematical Hut Thor dealt with the translation and interpretation and cross-indexing of all the information which came out of the enigma messages hot for and buy another King's dong called Frank birch was then in touch with a liaison to the the Navy the Laysan was actually a guy called Harry Hinsley who later became a major historian and professor of international relations but then with a mere point is that was his thing was the former form the interface with the Navy and it was absent a V because what you stay made of the information there was no I mean that was how how could any organization I mean of course it was had to be like that and it was the the it was the Navy who has to decide when they could afford to use the information and when they might be giving it away I can be quite clear it was nothing to do with Alan Turing or the code-breaking people as to what use was made of the and what use was made of the information [Applause] yes anyone going about that yeah well he had he was always sickly and had tuberculosis from a young age he always looked sickly and all the time I think yes in fact yeah but he was very obviously I mean he was a very distinctive character in his own right and yeah but he did take it did take out and cheering completely by surprise as far as I know sort of a question about his biology if you like with his dreamy state that you described and his quick temper and so on I kind of wonder whether or not he had attention deficit disorder and then secondly a lot of the kids who have that have had brain trauma so I was wondering if you read or if you found anything about his early birth period perinatal period or they have a particularly traumatic birth I'm well I'm not sure I agree with the characterization of his psychology and I certainly don't know anything like that so I wouldn't say his temper was particularly quick I mean he just spoke he had more he had her planes speaking manner and his style was like you might compare it with George Orwell style wishes wishes plain speaking English and he he behaved in a similar similar manner he was very unaffected by a class distinction didn't like it and he liked doing his own things so example would be when working on the computer developments after the war he combined it with his running training by going by running between the and office sites 20 miles or so and and what other people wouldn't have dreamt of doing that but he just said well that's logical because I can combine they need to go from one office to the other with doing the marathon training I mean here just that bad attitude I don't think he was but he could be a bit happy but it could be extremely warm and and encouraging to people as well and made an enormous following and and I mean the young people he worked with that I just briefly described he made most tremendous impact on and they just I mean they just loved his encouragement and the stimulation and the worlds that they introduced him that they introduced them to I mean he's just he's a full person not a not someone who sums up in one kind of characteristic it was quite mercurial he could vary quite a lot from from elation to the depression I said that that probably is a characteristic and he had this sort of scruffiness which was very striking in those days but nowadays you know I mean even gnosis because if he's gone I mean he'd gone I mean it's it's just it stood out in the very conventional people at that time a lot of the things which are meant to be really odd about him but just the things which are typical of science or a typical of higher education for that matter and also maybe to do with him being gay I'm not not accepting all the conventional structures and assumptions to do with marriages and small talk and in-laws and that kind of thing I missed the psychological categories to be honest and I just yeah super creative people and you find out they're a little quirky you go that's it you gotta be quick yeah ignoring the needs of successful authors artists architects and so forth who aren't weird in any way so they don't stand out okay you're the material person let's see if there's anything that stands out Oh ADHD very like there's nothing he did stand out I mean he was a larger-than-life character I mean amongst the people who worked there he was he was distinctive you would feel his presence when he came into the room in a way that you didn't with other people I think I think that's true to say but then some of that is simply the fact that he had this tremendous grasp on everything that was going on and that communicated itself to everyone well it's Jo is non-stationary cleverness but he just had this sense that everyone appreciated as he really really understood the whole picture in a way that other people only other people didn't always have [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Skeptic

Views: 33,187

Rating: 4.9000001 out of 5

Keywords: Skeptics Society, skepticism, Michael Shermer, Alan Turing, Enigma, Dr. Andrew Hodges, Benedict Cumberbatch, Distinguished Science Lecture, Enigma Code, artificial intelligence, computers, gay rights, mathematics

Id: 3NODW5sok5U

Length: 99min 22sec (5962 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 30 2018