While on the youtube website, I came across a university lecture at UNSW 2008 on Alan Turing, who turned out to be a really fascinating brilliant mathematician. Awarded the OBE, he had 3 major accomplishments, he made the Turing Machine which turned out to be the basis for modern day computers, second, he began talking about the concept of Artificial Intelligence and thirdly, he broke the Enigma code and helped turn the tide of World War II.He worked with a team at Bletchley Park with other codebreakers. The Enigma machine had 150 million million possible encryptions and the Germans believed that it was virtually unbreakable.
The enigma machine was used by the Uboats. When they broke the enigma code, they were able to stop the UBoats from sinking British Merchant Ships, enabling Great Britain to remain fighting the war and saved numerous lives. In a documentary at Nat Geo, they said that British Merchant Marine service suffered 70% casualties! So when he broke the code, more Uboats were sunk and practically put an end to the threat of Uboats in the atlantic.
I love the idea that my beloved mac is his invention. It's just really sad that he killed himself in 1954 at the age of 42. He was persecuted for being gay. He commited suicide by eating an apple injected with cyanide. Accdg to Wikipedia his favorite story was Snow White, where she eats a poisoned apple and sleeps forever. I was touched to find that in 2009, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote an article in the Guardian deploring how Turing was badly treated by the government.
What the lecturer at UNSW said was really interesting. He said that modern computers are NOT more powerful than the Turing Machine. They're just faster. To think he made it in the 1950's. If only he hadn't killed himself, I wonder where he would have taken modern computing.
Rest in peace, Mr. Turing.
