PRIDE - The Life of Alan Turing by Josh Pooley

June is PRIDE month🌈, a moment for those who identify as LGBTQIA+ and their allies, to pause and reflect on how far they have come but also celebrate the breadth, strength and beauty of experience within the community. These articles aim to inspire you through the stories of resilience, strength and determination within the LGBTQIA+ community. 

This article was written by Josh Pooley, a chair of the PRISM network and an Advanced Data Fellowship apprentice at Capco.

Alan Turing, many of us may have heard the name in passing or noted his appearance in 2021 on the new £50 notes. He was a genius mathematician and data scientist among many other significant areas of expertise. He is widely considered as the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. His most notable work during the Second World War with his code-breaking of the Enigma Machine. This pride, we have decided to reflect on the life and achievements of Alan Turing, as an LGBTQ+ individual himself during a time when being part of the LGBTQ+ community was outlawed. 

Born 23 June 1912 in Maida Vale, London, England, Alan began his journey in life. His parents had enrolled him into St Michael's, a primary school in East Sussex. The headmistress there recognised his talent, noting that she has "...had clever boys and hardworking boys, but Alan is a genius." 

In 1926, at the age of 13, Turing went on to Sherborne School, a boarding independent school in the market town of Sherborne in Dorset where he formed a significant friendship with fellow pupil Christopher Collan Morcom whom many consider Turing’s first love. Unfortunately, this relationship was cut short by Morcom's death, in February 1930, from complications of bovine tuberculosis. Turing had coped with his grief by working that much harder on the topics of science and mathematics that he had shared with Morcom.

Turing then went on to study as an undergraduate from 1931 to 1934 at King's College, Cambridge, where he was awarded first-class honours in mathematics. Turing then went on to study for his Ph.D. in mathematics at Princeton University from 1936 to 1938. In addition to his purely mathematical work, he studied cryptology and also built three of four stages of an electro-mechanical binary multiplier.

A Turing Machine is a mathematical tool equivalent to a digital computer. It was suggested by the mathematician Turing in the 30s and has been since then the most widely used model of computation in computability and complexity theory.

The model consists of an input-output relation that the machine computes. The input is given in binary form on the machine's tape, and the output consists of the contents of the tape when the machine halts.

The problem with the Turing machine is that a different machine must be constructed for every new computation to be performed for every input-output relation.

This is the reason the Universal Turing machine was introduced which along with input on the tape, it also takes the description of a machine.

The Universal Turing machine can simulate the workings of any other machine, this in turn allowed for the various workings of the machine to take place without the need for consistently building new machines. Think of using a separate device for word, PowerPoint, excel. This would get extremely costly and lack in efficiency.

The Universal Turing Machine would control the machine by changing its state based on the input. This leads to the idea of a “computer running another computer”.

Of more recent times, Turing's efforts during the Second World War have been more greatly celebrated. In 1939, he took up a full-time role at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire – where top-secret work was carried out to decipher the military codes used by Germany and its allies.

The main focus of Turing’s work at Bletchley was in cracking the ‘Enigma’ code. The Enigma was a type of enciphering machine used by the German armed forces to send messages securely. Essentially, all messages were encoded in such a way that if they were intercepted before reaching their dedicated recipient, they would still remain unreadable to anyone who doesn't have the knowledge or “code” to unscramble the message. 

Turing played a key role in this, inventing – along with fellow code-breaker Gordon Welchman – a machine known as the Bombe. This device helped to significantly reduce the work of the code-breakers.

The Bombe took the encoded message, using the wheel order, wheel settings and plugboard configuration to discover the daily key. The bombe would in turn decipher 3-5,000 enigma messages a day, providing crucial and valuable information which eventually assisted in winning the war.

The Turing test, originally called the imitation game (Whereby the more recent film title originated from) by Alan Turing in 1950. This test was to consider a particular machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour, and thus really paved the way for Artificial Intelligence, better known as AI.

The test was introduced by Turing in his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" while working at the University of Manchester. It opens with the words: "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'" Because "thinking" is difficult to define.

Turing describes the new form of the problem in terms of a three-person game called the "imitation game", in which an interrogator asks questions of a man and a woman in another room in order to determine the correct sex of the two players. Turing's new question is: "Are there imaginable digital computers that would do well in the imitation game?" This question, Turing believed, is one that can actually be answered. In the remainder of the paper, he argued against all the major objections to the proposition that "machines can think".

In 1941, Turing proposed marriage to Hut 8 colleague Joan Clarke, a fellow mathematician and cryptanalyst, but their engagement was short-lived. After admitting his homosexuality to his fiancée, who was reportedly "unfazed" by the revelation, Turing decided that he could not go through with the marriage.

In January 1952, Turing was 39 when he started a relationship with Arnold Murray, a 19-year-old unemployed man. Just before Christmas, Turing was walking along Manchester's Oxford Road when he met Murray just outside the Regal Cinema and invited him to lunch. On 23 January, Turing's house was burgled. Murray told Turing that he and the burglar were acquainted, and Turing reported the crime to the police. During the investigation, he acknowledged a sexual relationship with Murray. Homosexual acts were criminal offences in the United Kingdom at that time, and both men were charged with "gross indecency" under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885. Initial committal proceedings for the trial were held on 27 February during which Turing's solicitor "reserved his defence", i.e., did not argue or provide evidence against the allegations.

Turing was convicted and given a choice between imprisonment and probation. His probation would be conditional on his agreement to undergo hormonal physical changes designed to reduce libido. He accepted the option of injections of what was then called stilboestrol (now known as diethylstilbestrol or DES), a synthetic oestrogen; this feminization of his body was continued for the course of one year. The treatment rendered Turing impotent and caused breast tissue to form.

Turing’s legacy continues throughout. In 1999, Time magazine named Turing as one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th century and stated, "The fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine."

The film “The Imitation Game” 2014, was based on the life and work of Turing, named after the original name for The Turing Test. This film takes you through the wartime efforts of Turing cracking the enigma code, and touched on the later periods in his life whereby he was convicted for his homosexuality. Though it has been criticised for downplaying Turing's homosexuality, it is still a relevant and moving film. 

Bletchley Park in todays age is open to all as a museum of the machines used to break the enigma code along with so many other amazing artifacts surrounding Turing. I myself had the pleasure of visiting there in the past and would highly recommend to anyone interested in the history of Data and Computing. 

Alan continues to influence today’s day and age. Without his thought process on computers' abilities to think, we may have never touched on the idealism of Artificial Intelligence which we are seeing an increased amount of now, from Siri/Alexa/Cortana taking the world by storm in 2011 to Sophia, the social humanoid robot developed in 2016.

Find out what else we have planned throughout the month of June here🌈

Our PRIDE partner 'Drop Bear Beer' have been so kind as to provide the Multiverse Community with a discount code that can be used during the month of June! MVPRIDE10 will provide 10% off everything on Drop Bear Beer’s online store until the end of June. Click this link to have the code automatically applied to your shop.

Sponsored by the PRISM Network
All Community Pride activity is sponsored by PRISM, our network for LGBTQ+ individuals and active allies. The Network provides a safe and comfortable space to start conversations surrounding any topics related to the community, to drive positivity, and to help support each other.
You can request to join the PRISM network here, we look forward to seeing you there!