1. Personal Profile
Alan Turing, British computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and theoretical biologist, is known as the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. Born June 23, 1912 in London, England, he died on June 7, 1954 from eating apples soaked in cyanide solution.
Turing
2. Life experience
Born in 1912 in London, England, died in 1954 (age 41) in Manchester, England.
In 1926 (at the age of 14), he was admitted to the famous Sherben College in London and received a good secondary education.
In 1930 and 1931 , he twice won the Natural Science Prize established by the parents of one of his classmates, Mocombe, for which he received a paper entitled " The Reaction of Sulfites and Halides in Acidic Solutions " , which was appreciated by the government inspector , and his interest in the natural sciences laid the foundation for some of his later research, and his mathematical ability earned him the King Edward VI Golden Shield Medal in Mathematics when he was in secondary school.
In 1931 (at the age of 19), Turing was admitted to the "King's College" of Cambridge University to specialize in mathematics, and received a mathematics scholarship for his excellent grades, where his mathematical ability was fully developed.
In 1935 (23 years old), Turing stayed on to teach after graduation, and in less than a year, he published several weighty mathematical papers. His first mathematical paper, "Equivalence of Left and Right Periodicity," was published in the Journal of the London Mathematical Society.
In the same year, he also wrote "On Gaussian Error Functions", which led to him being directly elected as a researcher at King's College by a university student, and the following year won the famous Smith Prize in mathematics in the United Kingdom, becoming one of the most prestigious graduates of King's College.
To this end, Cambridge University specially announced a half-day holiday to celebrate, and Professor Russell also attached great importance to Turing, arranging Turing lectures and teachings.
In May 1936 (at the age of 24), Turing wrote his most important mathematical work, "On Computable Numbers and Their Applications to Decision Problems", which attracted widespread attention immediately after being published in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society No. 42 in 1937.
In September 1936, Turing was invited to study at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, USA, to pursue a doctorate in mathematics and work with Church. While in the United States, he did some research on group theory, which covered the fields of logic, algebra, and number theory, and wrote his doctoral dissertation.
Another article published by Turing in 1937 (25 years old) "Computability and λ Definability" broadened the "Church thesis" proposed by Church and formed the "Church-Turing thesis", which is of fundamental significance to the strictness of computational theory and the formation and development of computer science.
In 1938 (26 years old), he received his Ph.D. in Princeton with a thesis entitled "Ordinal-based logical systems", which was officially published in 1939 and had a profound impact on the study of mathematical logic.
In 1938, Turing returned to his alma mater, King's College, Cambridge, where he continued his theoretical research in logic and number theory as a researcher.
In 1939 (27 years old) World War II broke out, Britain declared war on Germany, Turing immediately enlisted in the army, officially served in the "Government Coding and Cryptography College", engaged in deciphering the German code of World War II, and helped the Allies win World War II.
Turing's decoder
From 1940 to 1942, as one of the main participants and contributors, he made outstanding achievements in deciphering the communication code of Nazi Germany, and successfully deciphered the code of the German U-submarine, which made great contributions to turning the tide of the Allied Atlantic theater in World War II.
In 1942 (at the age of 30), he traveled to the United States for several months to make the voice encryption systems of the two countries compatible in order to establish intelligence sharing at the highest level in the joint use of German U-submarines, as well as to establish a secret secure telephone hotline for Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt of the United States.
From 1943 to 1945 (31-33 years old), he served as the general counsel of the Anglo-American code-breaking department.
At the end of World War II in 1945, Turing was demobilized, and then hired as a senior researcher at the National Physical Laboratory of the United Kingdom, so he returned to his birthplace London to concentrate on computer theory.
From 1945 to 1948 (33-36 years old) he worked on the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) at the National Physical Laboratory.
In 1946 (at the age of 34), Turing was awarded the "OBE", or "Order of the British Empire", which is an honor given by the British royal family to those who have made great contributions to the country and the people.
Order of the British Empire
From 1947 to 1948 (35-36 years old), he was mainly engaged in the research of computer program theory, and at the same time made pioneering theoretical research in the field of neural networks and artificial intelligence.
In 1949 (age 37) he became deputy director of the Computer Laboratory at the University of Manchester, responsible for the software work of the first real computer: the Manchester One.
In 1949, he became the first scientist in the world to apply computers to mathematical research.
In 1950 (38 years old), he wrote an article proposing the famous "Turing test".
In October 1950, Turing published another article entitled "Can Machines Think?" The paper became an epoch-making work, and it was this article that won Turing the crown of "father of artificial intelligence".
In 1951 (39 years old), he engaged in nonlinear theory of biology. Turing was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, becoming the fourth member of his family.
In 1952 (40 years old) Turing wrote a chess program, and later the research group of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico designed the world's first computer program chess on MANIAC based on Turing theory.
On June 7, 1954 (age 41), due to the "treatment" of homosexual tendencies that he was forced to endure, Turing, who originally loved sports, was greatly injured physically and mentally. Turing was found dead in a bed at home with a bitten apple at the head of the bed. After investigation, the police believed that it was cyanide poisoning, and the investigation concluded that it was suicide.
On June 23, 1998, the London City Government inlaid a blue bronze plaque symbolizing human wisdom and science on the head-on wall of Turing's birthplace, engraved with the name and date of birth of the founder of computer science, commemorating the 86th anniversary of the birth of the computer master, and tens of thousands of people attended the memorial ceremony.
On June 7, 2004, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of the top genius of computer science and cryptography, thousands of scholars and students from all over the world came to Manchester to gather in front of the apartment where Turing lived before his death.
Manchester City Hall on the wall of this extremely ordinary but permanent historic building because of Turing, a commemorative bronze plaque, still blue, is solemnly inlaid with a commemorative bronze plaque, still blue, which reads: 1912-1954, the founder of computer science and cryptographer, Alan Turing, the hero of the "mystery" code during the war years, died in Sri Lanka.
Turing House
3. Social evaluation
Turing's mind is active, and his creativity is also multifaceted. Colleagues recall that in his secret work during the war, he created many new statistical techniques, but none of them were published, and later re-created by others, one of which was the "sequential analysis" rediscovered and proposed by A. Walder.
He also studied group theory, and in the article "Chemical Basis of Morphological Formation", he used a rather esoteric and unique mathematical method to study the distribution regularity of chemicals that determine the color or morphology of organisms (which he called formins) in the formation of planar morphology (such as the piebald on the body surface of cows) and three-dimensional morphology (such as the distribution of radiats and leaf order), trying to explain the idea that "the laws of physicochemistry can fully explain the fact of many morphological formations". This topic began to be explored only in the 80s of the 20th century.
Turing also carried out foundational research work that came to be known as "mathematical embryology". He also tried to use mathematical methods to study the structure of the human brain, such as the problem of estimating how much information can be stored in a brain with a given number of neurons. These are still novel topics that attract many scientists.
It is believed that Turing was a rare wizard with extraordinary insight in the history of science: his ingenious achievements made him famous during his lifetime, and his profound foresight made him admired after his death. When people found that some independent research results of later generations seemed to be only proving the extent to which Turing's thought was ahead of their times, they all felt heartfelt regret for his untimely death.
He is the founder of computer logic, and many important methods of artificial intelligence also stem from him. His important contribution to computers lies in his concept of finite state automata that is a Turing machine, for artificial intelligence, he proposed an important measurement standard "Turing test", if a machine can pass the Turing test, then it is a complete sense of the intelligent machine, and there is no difference from people. His outstanding contributions made him the first person in the computer community.
Apple's logo was once mistaken for stemming from half of an apple bitten by Turing's suicide, but both the designer's designer and Apple denied this.
Fourth, the famous Turing machine
In 1936, Turing submitted a paper to the authoritative mathematical journal in London, entitled "On the Application of Numerical Computing to Decision Problems". In this paper, Turing gave a strict mathematical definition of "computability" and proposed the idea of the famous "Turing Machine".
The "Turing machine" is not a specific machine, but a model of thought that can make a very simple but extremely powerful computing device for calculating all imaginable computable functions. The basic idea is to use machines to simulate the process of people performing mathematical operations with pen and paper.
Turing machines are recognized as the prototype of modern computers, this machine can read a series of 0s and 1s, these numbers represent the steps required to solve a problem, and follow this step to solve a specific problem.
This idea was revolutionary at the time, because even in the 50s, most computers could only solve a specific problem, not general-purpose, while Turing machines were theoretically general-purpose machines.
This idea was revolutionary at the time, because even in the 50s, most computers could only solve a specific problem, not general-purpose, while Turing machines were theoretically general-purpose machines.
In Turing's view, this machine only needs to keep some of the simplest instructions, and a complex work can be achieved by breaking it down into these simplest operations. It was really remarkable that he was able to have such an idea at the time.
He believes that there is an algorithm that can solve most problems, and the difficult part is how to determine the simplest instruction set, what instruction set is the least, and the difficult part is how to break down complex problems into these instructions.
The "Turing machine" imagined using an infinitely long strip of paper divided into many grids. If Gerry draws a line, it represents "1", and a blank grid represents "0". Imagine that this "computer" also has a read-write function: you can read information from and write information on the tape.
The only computing function of the computer is to turn "1" into "0" or "0" into "1" for each block of paper tape forward. "0" and "1" represent the steps in solving a particular mathematical problem. The "Turing machine" can recognize each step in the calculation process and can perform a series of calculations step by step until the final answer is obtained.
Turing machine model
A "Turing machine" is a virtual "computer" that completely ignores the state of the hardware and focuses on logical structures. In his famous article, Turing further designed a model known as a "universal Turing machine", which can simulate the working state of any "Turing machine" that solves a specific mathematical problem. He even imagined storing data and programs on a tape. The "universal Turing machine" is actually the most primitive model of the modern general-purpose computer.
Atanasov of the United States really researched and manufactured the world's first electronic computer ABC in 1939, which adopted a binary system, the circuit break and combination represent the numbers 0 and 1 respectively, and the use of tubes and circuits to perform logic operations. ABC is the first hardware implementation of the "Turing machine", visible and tangible. Von Neumann not only developed a more functional and versatile electronic computer in the 40s of the last century, but also designed a coding program for the computer, and also realized the storage and input of paper tape.