Just in time for all the publicity surrounding the Oscar-nominated film The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch, the Thammasat University Libraries have acquired two books about the film’s subject, Alan Turing.

Alan Turing: the enigma is the book that inspired The Imitation Game. Another book, Turing’s cathedral: the origins of the digital universe further explores the contributions of this remarkable scientist. Alan Turing (1912 –1954) was a British computer scientist and cryptanalyst. He was a leader in developing early computers, and built a so-called Turing machine upon which later computers were based. Apart from helping to found computer science and artificial intelligence, Turing played a key role in winning World War II for the Allies. He worked as a codebreaker and using a specially designed machine, broke the Nazi codes. This meant that England and the Allies had essential information that made it possible to win the Battle of the Atlantic. The longest World War II military campaign, the Battle of the Atlantic continued from 1939 until Germany was defeated in 1945. When the war was over in 1945, Turing was given a special award by King George VI for his great achievements, but since the work he did was still considered top secret, for a long time very few people knew anything about it. In 1952 Turing was prosecuted by the British government for being gay, since at the time being gay was illegal in England. He was ordered to take injections of estrogen as a primitive supposed treatment for homosexuality at that time, which caused severe depression. In 1954 Turing died of cyanide poisoning in what may have been a suicide.

Turing’s legacy.

It is certain that Turing made great scientific advances and helped win World War II, but his own government contributed to his death by persecuting him because of his sexual identity. The injustice of this is apparent to most people today and forms the basis for any biography or film about Turing. Only in 2009 did the British government formally apologize for the “appalling way” that Turing was treated. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown stated:

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of the Second World War could have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely…Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him…But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate – by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices – that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present. So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work, I am very proud to say: we’re sorry. You deserved so much better.

In 2013, Queen Elizabeth II signed a posthumous pardon for Turing.

Turing and Thailand

Among the other honors received by Alan Turing after his death was to have a charitable organization named after him. The Turing Foundation was founded in July 2006 by Pieter Geelen, a computer scientist who greatly admired Turing’s achievements. The foundation is especially interested in nature conservation, education, art and leprosy research and has an annual budget of about four million euros (around 38,000,000 Thai baht). Among the foundation’s projects was to help a school in Tha Thon, Northern Thailand in 2009. Children of local tribes in the region of Tha Thon in Northern Thailand were taught standard Thai language so that they could pursue traditional higher education. If they only speak their local dialect, they have trouble getting higher education. In 2008, the Turing Foundation also paid for the education of HIV-Infected orphans in Rayong on the east coast of the Gulf of Thailand. The foundation assisted the Friends of Camillian Social Center Rayong which helps to educate HIV or AIDS-infected orphans in Rayong. Before this, in 2007-2008 the Turing Foundation helped schools in Northwest Thailand by assisting the Samsara Foundation Thailand, which supports the education of poor rural children in Northern Thailand regardless of religious or ethnic background. The specific project was to organize small-scale educational improvements in the Mae Sariang district of Northwest Thailand. 25,000 poor children who are taught in 178 schools. live in mountain villages traditionally inhabited by the Bwa G’Naw, known also as Karen, Kariang, or Yang, and the Hmong hill tribes. Some of the children live in school dormitories for most of the year since it would take more than one day of travel to return to their villages. The Turing Foundation gave money to buy schoolbooks for the poorest schools in the Mae Sariang, Mae Lanoi and Sop Moei districts, and to build dormitories and cafeterias with kitchens and indoor plumbing for the Cho Sii Deu Nua School and the Huay Muang School.

Turing would have approved.

These good deeds happened long after Alan Turing was dead, but biographers inform us that he was a benevolent person who placed high importance on education. Turing’s inventiveness in the field of artificial intelligence is directly linked to a fascination with education. He suggested an experiment that would later be called the Turing test, to decide whether or not a machine is intelligent. A computer can be described as thinking if in conversation, a human being is believes it is another human being. Turing also suggested that instead of creating a computer program that worked the way adult minds do, it would be better to do one similar to a child’s mind and then educate it. Today a variation on the Turing test will pop up on your computer screen sometimes. It is called the CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) test. Its point is to make sure that you are using your computer and it has not been taken over by remote control by another computer. Following Turing’s suggestion, the CAPTCHA program protects websites against bots by “generating and grading tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot.”

Turing was such a forward-thinking person that in 1948 he wrote a program for a computer to play chess, even before such a computer had been invented. In recent years, more and more people have realized what a key thinker Turing was. In 1999, Time Magazine named him one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century: “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.” Many universities worldwide now have statues or other tributes to Turing, including in Asia, a bust at Southwest University, Chongqing, China.

(all images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).