Cracking the Enigma Code, designing the world’s first commercially available computer, creating the Turing Test - these are only a few of the many achievements Alan Turing accomplished in his life. Alan Mathison Turing, more commonly known as Alan Turing, is believed to be the Father of Modern Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. Born on June 23rd, 1912 in Maida Vale, London England, Turing was the son of Julius Mathison Turing and Ethel Sara Stoney. Because of Julius’s work as a civil service commissioner in British India, both Julius and Ethel were constantly traveling between England and India; therefore, leaving Turing and his older brother, John Turing to spend their childhood in various English foster homes. At the age of 10, …show more content…
Then for the next two years, he studied mathematical logic and cryptology at Princeton University while formulating some ideas of building a computer. Soon he was contacted by the Government Code and Cypher School who asked him to help the breaking of the German Enigma codes. Once World War II was declared, Turing immediately started working at the Government Code and Cypher School which is a British code-breaking organization at Bletchley Park. By late 1940, Alan Turing and another mathematician named Gordon Welchman developed the Bombe which was an electromechanical machine that helped decode the German Enigma codes. His contribution, according to Winston Churchill and based on the beliefs of many people, had greatly helped shorten World War II by two years. After World War II ended, the National Physical Laboratory in London invited Turing to design a computer. By early 1946, Turing designed the Automatic Computing Engine(ACE). While he started building the design, he encountered delays and was offered a job by Max Newman in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Manchester. Therefore, he resigned from his job at the National Physical Laboratory in London. During his years working at the Department of Mathematics, Turing contributed greatly to the Ferranti Mark 1 which was the world’s first commercially available …show more content…
This paper discusses many future questions which would arise as computers developed. Most importantly, this paper introduced the Turing Test. The Turing Test states that a computer can only be truly intelligent, if and only if a human interrogator cannot tell the difference between the computer and a human through conversation. Although the Turing Test is still considered a benchmark for measuring the progression of Artificial Intelligence, questions have arisen on the relevance of this test since no computer has been able to pass this