Pass notes No 3,149: Alan Turing
Source: Royal Mail
Is it time the father of the modern computer was honoured on the £10 note?
Wartime hero and mathematician, Alan Turing.
Age: 100 in June if he was still alive, but he died in 1954.
Appearance: Old school egghead.
Is that what he was? You bet. Turing was a mathematician, code-breaker, computer scientist and war hero who helped defeat the Germans.
How did he do that?
He developed the bombe.
The atomic bomb?
No. Bombe with an "e".
Isn't that some kind of ice cream? It's also the name of an electromechanical decryption device that broke ciphers produced by the German Enigma machine. After the war he was instrumental in the development of the modern computer.
Wow. This guy should be on a stamp. He is. A new stamp bearing his likeness has just been issued by Royal Mail.
What took so long? Turing was prosecuted for homosexuality in 1952, accepted chemical castration as an alternative to prison and killed himself two years later. Official recognition of his mistreatment has been slow in coming: Gordon Brown apologised for it in 2009. Even so, a recent move to have Turing formally pardoned for the crime of gross indecency failed.
An apology and a stamp. Thanks a bunch. Now an e-petition (10,000 signatures and counting) is circulating to demand that Turing be featured on the £10 note.
Steady. I mean, what else has he done? Turing gave his name to both the Turing machine, a hypothetical mathematical model that anticipated computer processing, and the Turing Test for artificial intelligence.
I think I might be artificially intelligent. How do you take the Turing test? A human judge engages in text-only conversation and tries to determine whether his interlocutor is another human, or a robot.
Do you think I'm human, or a robot? Human.
Right! How did you guess? A robot would already know all this stuff about Alan Turing.
Or would it? Shut up.
Do say: "Like most honours bestowed on Alan Turing, this one is long overdue."
Don't say: "How can you tell the difference between a robot and a Russian model who really wants to be your Twitter friend?"
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