This is the collection of links and papers where you can learn more about Alan Turing, his life and his contributions to today's technology.
Alan Mathison Turing (23 June 1912 - 7 June 1954) was one of the pioneers in today's technology. He had some key contributions in breaking the Enigma machine during the World War II, which had a huge impact on the result of World War II. He also pioneered the work in Artificial Intelligence (even before the term Artificial Intelligence was established), where he was the first one to discuss the ways of replicating human brain inside of a machine. His papers remain relevant today in this field, 60 years after they were published. Turing test (a test which is used to determine is a machine intelligence really indistinguishable from human intelligence) was named after him.
He was sentenced to hormonal therapy because he was convicted as a homosexual (something that was illegal back then in the UK). He died two years later. Even though it was believed that he had committed suicide, Jack Copeland (the author of a book I will mention later) is not so sure.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology to Alan Turing on behalf of the British government in 2009. Queen Elizabeth granted him a posthumous pardon in 2013.
The list of papers published by Alan Turing during his life. This list is arranged in the chronological order.
- Equivalence of left and right almost periodicity (1935)
- Computability and λ-Definability (1937)
- On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem (1937)
- Finite approximations to lie groups (1938)
- The extensions of a group (1938)
- Systems of logic based on ordinals (1939)
- The use of dots as brackets in Church's system (1942)
- Lecture to L.M.S. Feb. 20 1947 (1947)
- Rounding-off errors in matrix processes (1948)
- A practical form of type theory I (1948)
- Checking a large routine (1949)
- Computing machinery and intelligence (1950)
- Programmers' handbook for Manchester electronic computer. Mark II (1951)
- Intelligent machinery, a heretical theory (1951)
- Can digital computers think? (1951)
- Can automatic calculating machines be said to think? (1952)
- The chemical basis of morphogenesis (1952)
- Digital computers applied to games (1953)
- Some calculations of the Riemann zeta-function (1953)
A short biography of Alan Turing is written by Andrew Hodges.
About Alan Turing:
- Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges. Originally published in 1983. The latest edition is from 2014. This book inspired the movie The Imitation Game (2014).
- Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age (2014) by Jack Copeland
Multiple Mentions of Alan Turing:
- Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig
- 2030 - WIll Computers Become Human? by Peter Bornstein
The movie The Imitation Game (2014) tried to show Turing's contributions during the World War II. It received an Oscar award for the Best Writing Adapted Screenplay in the 87th Academy Awards. The movie has some controversy attached to his historical accuracy, as described here and here.
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Even though large news sources claim that the Turing test was passed for the first time by Eugene Goostman (a chatbot made specifically to pass the Turing test), the replication of the test is considered far from the real Turing test. More on this controversy can be found here.