Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma (Kindle Single) by Boyle David

Author:Boyle, David [Boyle, David]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2014-02-09T16:00:00+00:00

VI

‘There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.’

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1819

Turing’s period with the National Physical Laboratory, and with Darwin, was deeply frustrating. He struggled against the huge class division that emerged between theory and engineering. He was disappointed in the progress towards ACE and irritated that the rules prevented him from getting involved in practical engineering. He left his work at the Laboratory in 1947, on half pay, and took up his fellowship at King’s College, which he had set aside eight years before to help crack wartime codes.

Post-war King’s was a different place. Keynes was dead. Forster still occupied his rooms, scribbling away. Wittgenstein was ill (he would die of prostate cancer in 1951). The pre-war atmosphere of leftist excitement had given way to a dour, austerity-driven fear of communism. The Cold War was at its height and there was also a new intolerance abroad, a fear of betrayal and with it a terror of what society regarded as ‘perversion’. There was also a new prurient interest in what people got up to in the privacy of their bedrooms.

Turing had always been immune to this kind of social control. He remained explicit about his homosexuality, except of course with his mother, who had years of frustration behind her about his failure to behave in precisely the right way. He began a relationship with Neville Johnson, a third-year mathematics student, which was more like ‘friendship with sex’. He played chess with Pigou, the economist, and used to go on walks during which the two of them would play chess games by visualising the moves.

But there were frustrations at Cambridge too. He had a rival: Maurice Wilkes had money and shared with Darwin the suspicion that Turing’s minimalist design was allowing them to fall behind. Turing barely visited Wilkes’ lab, though it was hardly far away; when he did he remarked that Wilkes looked like a beetle.

What Turing so badly needed was someone in authority who would recognise that the ridiculous, class-based division between theoreticians and engineers, which had made his work so frustrating at Teddington, ought to be dumped, and who was prepared to run with his vision of computing which was faster and simpler. It was as if, in order to create a vision of the split between hardware and software, he would have to end that same division among the pioneers of computing. It so happened that this was precisely the way forward, as understood by his old mentor Max Newman.

In May 1948 Turing resigned formally from the National Physical Laboratory. Darwin was furious, and Turing fulfilled his remaining obligations by writing one final report about intelligent machinery. The report listed the objections to intelligent machines. There was the limited ability of all machines so far produced, which was not encouraging. There was the fact that human beings can go beyond the failure of some machines to come up with answers. There was the problem that the ‘intelligence’ of machines might only be a reflection of the intelligence of their creators.

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