Alan M. Turing

Biographies and articles related to his life and contributions to computer science and AI

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I propose to consider the question, "Can Machines Think?" - Alan Mathison Turing

Alan Turing

Good Starting Places

Alan Mathison Turing. From the MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, School of Mathematical and Computational Sciences, University of St. Andrews, Fife, Scotland. Includes a biographical sketch, a list of references, and more!

The Origins of Artificial Intelligence. Part of Andrew Hodges' Alan Turing Internet Scrapbook. "Alan Turing was based at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, while acting as the leading cryptanalyst of German ciphers during the Second World War. It was during this period that he formulated the ideas that emerged after the war as Intelligent Machinery, and would now be called Artificial Intelligence. He must have been influenced by the astonishing power of mechanical methods at Bletchley Park. The codebreaking work at Bletchley Park was highly secret and discussed only with those directly involved; but Turing used games, particularly chess-playing, as a close analogy. ... After 1945 Turing often used chess-playing as an example of what a computer could do, and in his 1946 report on the possibilities of a computer, made his first reference to machine 'intelligence' in connection with chess-playing. In 1948 he met Donald Michie again and competed with him in writing a simple chess-playing algorithm."

Sites with Collected Information about Turing

Alan Turing Home Page. Maintained by Andrew Hodges, author, Alan Turing: The Enigma. Includes biographical information on Turing as well as description of the Turing Test.

The Turing Archive for the History of Computing. Maintained by Jack Copeland and Gordon Aston. In addition to what you'd expect to discover in an archive, you'll also find an wide ranging collection of reference articles.

Alan Turing: The Father of Modern Computer Science is a short biography containing several links to online information about Turing.

More Biographical Material

Code-Breaker - The life and death of Alan Turing. Jim Holt's review of David Leavitt’s, "The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer" (Norton/Atlas). The New Yorker (February 6, 2006). "Despite his immersion in engineering details, Turing's fascination with computing was essentially philosophical. 'I am more interested in the possibility of producing models of the action of the brain than in the practical applications of computing,' he wrote to a friend. Turing conjectured that, initially, at least, computers might be suited to purely symbolic tasks, those presupposing no 'contact with the outside world,' like mathematics, cryptanalysis, and chess-playing (for which he himself worked out the first programs on paper). But he imagined a day when a machine could simulate human mental abilities so well as to raise the question of whether it was actually capable of thought. In a paper published in the philosophy journal Mind, he proposed the now classic 'Turing test': a computer could be said to be intelligent if it could fool an interrogator --- perhaps in the course of a dialogue conducted via teletype --- into thinking it was a human being. Turing argued that the only way to know that other people are conscious is by comparing their behavior to one's own, and that there is no reason to treat machines any differently."

The First Hacker and his Imaginary Machine. Chapter 3 of the 1985 edition of Howard Rheingold's Tools for Thought (The MIT Press).

Alan Turing: Father of the computer. BBC News (April 28, 1999). "Turing believed that machines could be created that would mimic the processes of the human brain. He acknowledged the difficulty people would have accepting a machine to rival their own intelligence, a problem that still plagues artificial intelligence today."