-
BIOGRAPHY
Alan Mathison Turing was born on June 23, 1912 in London, the son of a colonial official who served in India. His parents, Julius Mathison Turing (Julius Mathison) and Ethel Sara Stoney (Ethel Sara Stoney) met and married in India. -
CHILDHOOD
As a child, he spent a long time living in India, because his father worked in the Colonial Administration of that country. During his childhood he was interested in reading, puzzles and numbers.
At the age of 6 he began his studies at St. Michael's College, where his teacher quickly saw the genius of Turing. At the age of 8 his interest in chemical knowledge and experimentation was so high that he designed a small laboratory in his house. -
STUDIES
He entered Sherborne Boarding School in Dorset, where he met Christopher Morcom and they became good friends; Some time later, his partner passed away, which was a great blow to Alan Turing, so much so that he became an atheist. The young man began to lean towards mathematics and science, an attitude that did not earn him respect from his teachers; even so, he won many of the mathematical prizes that were given out at school. -
ATHEISM
After the death of his great friend Christopher Morcom, Turing became an atheist. -
THE TURING MACHINE
Turing invented a machine which he called "the Turing machine", describing it as an automatic machine that reads a series of symbols printed on a tape and finds a logical pattern to simulate the logic of the symbols. With this he demonstrated that there were problems that a machine could not solve. -
COMPUTABLE NUMBERS
Turing publishes his study "The computable numbers, with an application to the "Entscheidungsproblem", where he presents his "Turing machine" as a theoretical model of a problem-solving machine. -
Creation
Between the years 1937 and 1938 he was at Princeton University, where he studied with Alonzo Church. In the year 1938, he returned to England to study the philosophy of mathematics, and in the same year he obtained his Ph.D. from Princeton; In his speech, he raised the concept of hypercomputing, in which he deepened the Turing machines with the so-called oracle machines, which were capable of studying problems that did not have an algorithmic solution. -
Thesis
At that time, thanks to the work done by Alan Turing and Alonzo Church, they formulated the Church-Turing Thesis, which stated that "Every algorithm is equivalent to a Turing machine." The Church-Turing thesis postulated that any computational model has the same algorithmic capabilities, or was a subset of those of a Turing machine. -
Main Support
In World War II, Alan Turing was one of the main creators of the Bletchley Park work to discover the Nazi secret codes. His studies of the Fish system helped lead to the development of the first digital electronic programmable computer called the Colossus, which was designed by Max Newman and his work group, and built by Thomas Flowers' group in 1943. -
labors
In 1945, he arrived in Richmond, London, to work at the National Physics Laboratory (NPL) in the design of the ACE (Automatic Computer Engine or Automatic Computing Engine). In 1946 he presented a study that would become the first detailed design of an automatic computer. By the year 1947, he wrote a paper on artificial intelligence, which was not published in his lifetime. -
OBE PRIZE
After the end of the 2WW, Turing is awarded by the government of England with "The most excellent order of the British Empire" for his enormous contribution to the victory of the allies. -
ACI
After the end of the war, Turing dedicated himself to conducting research at the National Physical Laboratory in England, managing to create what he called the Abbreviated Code Instruction, which is the origin of all current formal programming languages. -
MARK I
After resigning from the National Physical Laboratory, Turing was head of the laboratory at the University of Manchester, where he made some of the software for the Mark I computer. -
COMPUTER MACHINERY AND INTELLIGENCE
Turing wrote an article where he developed the idea of artificial intelligence and determined the Turing test, with which one can differentiate between a sentient and a sentient machine. However, this document was written in 1948 and published two years later. -
CHEMICAL FUNDAMENTALS OF MORPHOGENESIS
Between 1952 and 1954 he carried out studies on morphogenesis and phyllotaxis. These works were not published until 1992. -
DEATH
After a robbery in 1952, Turing filed a complaint and in the middle of the investigation, he acknowledged his homosexuality. Because of this, he was charged with "gross indecency and sexual perversion" and he was sentenced to chemical castration. Two years later he died in Wilmslow, Cheshire; at 41 years of age, due to eating cyanide-poisoned apple, which was classified as suicide.