Although Alan never confided his love to Chris, it is apparent that Alan was in love with him. Alan was a solitary boy and his first venture into serious friendship came to an unexpected and tragic ending, when his friend and idol, Christopher Morcom, succumbed to bovine tuberculosis.Īlan never forgot this first and perhaps deepest of all his human contacts, for it was in fact a mixture of friendship and love. However, as the weeks passed, his hero status declined as he revealed himself to be a rather untidy pupil prone to getting ink all over himself, and one who did not distinguish himself in most of his classes. He made quite a hit his first day, for he arrived on bicycle, having pedaled the 60 miles from Southampton, where the ferry from France had left him on a day of general strikes and no trains. At age thirteen, he was sent off to a boys' private boarding school called Sherborne, in the west of England. As a boy, he was inquisitive and humorously inventive but definitely not a child prodigy. Then they decided to return closer to England, and for a time lived in France, which gave Alan the opportunity to take school vacations there and learn French. Not long after his birth, his father returned to India, followed by his mother, and they spent the next few years there, leaving young Alan in England. Turing was born in London in 1912 of relatively well-to-do parents in the civil service in India. And yet this salient figure in world history has remained, as the book's subtitle says, an enigma. It is fair to say that we owe much to Alan Turing for the fact that we are not under Nazi rule today. And for a boy growing up in the 1920's and for a man in the next few decades, being homosexual-especially if one was British and belonged to the upper classes-was an unmentionable, terrible, and mysterious affliction.Īlan Turing, an atheist, homosexual, eccentric English mathematician, was in large part responsible not only for the concept of computers, incisive theorems about their powers, and a clear vision of computer minds, but also for the cracking of German ciphers during World War II. Alan Turing was homosexual, a fact that he took no particular pains to hide, especially as he grew older. Hodges goes far more deeply into Turing's mind, body, and soul than Sara Turing ever dared, for she wore conventional blinders and did not want to see how poorly her son fit into the standard molds of British society.
Hodges' rich and engrossing portrait is not the first book about Turing, since his mother, Sara Turing, wrote a sketchy memoir a few years after her son's death, which presents an image of Turing as a lovable, eccentric boy of a man, filled with the joy of ideas and driven by an insatiable curiosity about questions concerning mind and life and mechanism. And it's about time, for not only was Turing a very significant person in the science of this century, but his fascinating and difficult life illustrates serious problems that society has not yet grappled with successfully.
His 500-page biography of Turing, painstakingly put together from innumerable sources, including conversations with scores of people who knew Turing at various stages of his life, provides as vivid a picture as one could hope ofa most complex and intriguing individual. It would require someone who shares much with Turing to plumb his story deeply enough to do it justice, and Andrew Hodges, a young British writer with a doctorate in mathematics, has wonderfully succeeded in doing so. These are the sorts of questions that burned in Alan Turing's brain, and, taken at another level, they reveal highlights of Turing's troubled life.
#Alan turing enigma free#
CAN true intelligence be embodied in any sort of substrate-organic, electronic, or otherwise? Is mind more than pattern? How can we distinguish between a genuine mind and a clever façade? Is free will incompatible with a materialist, mechanistic view of living beings? Is there a contradiction in the notion of rule-bound creativity? Do our emotions and our intellects belong to separate compartments of ourselves? Could machines have emotions? Could machines be enchanted by ideas, by people, by other machines? Could machines be attracted to each other, fall in love? What would be the social norms for machines in love? Would there be proper and improper types of machine love affairs? Could a machine be frustrated and suffer? Could a frustrated machine release its pent-up feelings by going outdoors and self-propelling ten miles? Could a machine learn to enjoy the sweet pain of marathon running? Could a machine with a seeming zest for life destroy itself purposefully one day, planning the entire episode so as to fool its mother machine into "thinking" (which of course machines cannot do) that it had perished by accident?
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