Faced with the men of history who have marked a before and after in science we find Alan Turing. He is a British mathematician, computer theoretician, philosopher or, theoretical biologist, marathoner, logician and ultra-distance runner who aborted numerous advances in science during his time. He was born in 1912 and died in 1954. He was considered one of the Fathers of computer science and a forerunner of modern computing. Thanks to their contributions, it was possible to influence the formalization of different algorithm and computation concepts, among which we find the Turing machine.
In this article we are going to tell you all the biography and exploits of Alan Turing.
Biography of Alan Turing
As expected, in antiquity there was so much information about a field, so that a person could specialize in various branches of science. In this case, we have seen that this scientist dedicated himself to numerous branches of science, so he could contribute in different aspects. Alan Turing was ordered to lead a mission to being able to decipher Nazi messages that were encrypted during WWII. From an early age, he gave great answers to various problems in mathematics and was admitted as a student at King's College, Cambridge University, one of the most prestigious scientific institutions in the world.
In this institute he felt quite comfortable and recognized himself and a few other people as homosexual. At this time this was illegal in Britain, so not many people could know about it. During his university stage, first, student and I do it as a teacher, he related to other scientists of his time.
In 1936 he published an article that turned out to be the origin of theoretical computing. A he defined what was computable and what was not computable. That is to say, the computable was everything that could be solved by an algorithm. An algorithm is defined as the set of finite instructions that, through various steps in succession, leads to a solution of the problem. The rest that did not meet this definition were non-computable tasks. He was able to show that there were problems that had no solution, that is, they did not have an algorithmic solution.
In order to give a concept to all this, and gave the famous machine that bears his own name. It is an imaginary device that could execute any mathematical operation that can be solved by means of an algorithm. In the event that it can be programmed and transformed, it would become a computer. Nevertheless, Alan Turing never materialized this project, not being able to count on the necessary technical means.
Advances in science
Another of Alan Turing's feats was to predict the failures that affect our computers today. Before the existence of computers, this scientist not only theorized on the basis of their operation, but also also predicted future failures. This is how, while devising his machine, he defined the stopping problem, to affirm that there is no algorithm that can find out if an operation will be finite started or not.
Thanks to these concepts, he was able to predict that computers will dry and vary in the future. In other words, when a computer falls into an infinite loop, we must settle for restarting it in order to solve the problem. And it is assumed that there are problems that are not computable, por so there is no algorithm that can give a solution to it.
Alan Turing breaking codes
The British government called Alan Turing in 1938 to lead a team in the cryptography center of his country. He was responsible I had Camón's main mission to decipher the messages from the Enigma machines. These machines were in charge of being able to transmit coded orders to the Nazi submarines that operated in the Atlantic Ocean.
The contribution of the team that led Turing it was crucial to be able to have an outcome of the war in favor of the allies. And it is that they could achieve it with their ingenuity and the design of the first Bombe machines. These are electromechanical devices that are built exclusively to be able to break the Enigma codes.
After all this conflict, the fact of rebuilding a machine that had the same capabilities as the human brain was raised. This is about a project known as machines with a brain. It seeks to build an electronic digital computer to be able to solve more than one purpose and to be able to store a program in its memory. One of the great problems that Alan Turing had during his life is that they gave him medication to "cure" his homosexuality. This medication was imposed by a judge and it seriously affected his health.
In 1947 he was able to develop a new computer that was based on a computer capable of storing a program in its main memory, but it had much more capacity than the predecessor machine.
Artificial intelligence
At that time, Alan was very interested in artificial intelligence. That is to say, He was fascinated by the way in which the functions of the human brain could be artificially imitated. His best contribution to this field was once again the theoretical field. In their study they established various bases of artificial intelligence and proposed a type of test to determine whether a machine is intelligent or not.
After an incident with his lover, Alan Turing was arrested for his homosexuality and convicted, although a judge granted him probation in exchange for undergoing hormone treatment to be able to cure himself. All of this happened in 1952. This medication seriously affected his state of health and left him plunged into a depression that supposedly led him to suicide. As you can see, the dirt of before was not the same as it is now and this scientist could have contributed much more to accept homosexuality.
I hope that with this information you can learn more about Alan Turing and his advances in science.