The Father of Artificial Intelligence

IHe is the father of artificial intelligence.

The programming designer of the world’s first commercial computer.

The decoder of the Enigma.

A legendary scientist.

One of the greatest minds of the 20th century,

Alan Mathison Turing was everything but ordinary.

Born in London in 1912 in an upper-middle-class family with no scientific background, Alan was fascinated by science since his childhood. The headmistress of the day school which he attended when he was six years old acknowledged his talent from the beginning, and so did many of his teachers subsequently. Being a young boy interested in science caused many doubts within his family about him ever being able to attend the English Public School, however, at age 13, Alan was accepted into Sherborne, an English independent boarding school for boys. One of the fascinating facts is that his first day at Sherborne matched with the 1926 General Strike in Britain, but determined to attend, Alan rode his bicycle unaccompanied for 60 miles.

Although teachers at Sherborne School placed more interest and prominence on classical studies, Alan’s time spent there paved the way for his future as a scientist, mostly due to his extremely close relationship with his schoolmate, Christopher Morcom, with whom he shared a great interest in mathematics, cryptography, and astronomy. Some argue that Christopher was Alan’s first love and that his death of bovine tuberculosis in 1930 caused great sorrow for Alan, which he coped with by burying himself in books and working on various scientific topics.

By 1934, he graduated from King’s College, Cambridge where he was awarded first-class honors in mathematics. Two years later, he published “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” or better known as “Turing proof”, thus demonstrating the conjecture that some solely mathematical yes-no questions can never be answered by computation due to no existing single algorithm that faultlessly gives a correct “yes” or “no” answer to each example of the problem.

In 1936, he developed a “Turing machine”, which consists of an infinitely long tape with squares and symbols that acts as the memory in any form of data storage. Despite its simplicity, the machine can simulate basically any computer algorithm, no matter how complex it is. This machine became a blueprint for what we nowadays call computers.

To read more about ALan's remarkable life and accomplishments check out the original blog about Alan Turing we published on Medium on June 23, 2021.