Tom’s Challenge—The Riddler Results.

This week’s challenge champion is “Goldennib!” Way to go Nibby! Ya done good.
Second place goes to the reigning queen of the challenge, Quilldancer—always the one to beat.
And third place goes to Diesel! a new friend who popped over from the Sar guest post commentary and knew this answer out of his head, it appeared! Though I forgot to mention that Goldennib remembered Turing from a computer class she took and that he was associated with artificial intelligence.

Y’all done good. Real good. Here’s the skinny on this week’s mastermind:

Alan Turing is perhaps the most unsung hero of the twentieth century. He is another story equally as intriguing as Descartes or Wright from previous challenges. Turing attended the “public school.” – what we in America today think of as private school—the Sherbonne, and went on to King’s College, Cambridge to study mathematics. Turing was one of the first if not the first to pull logic into mathematical circles and marry philosophy and mathematics and to some extent in later years, psychology and neurology to try and create artificial intelligence. At the outset of this quest was a groundbreaking 1936 thesis entitled (short version) “On Computable Numbers,” which is the first extant paper written about how a fantasy machine would work that could calculate anything, using a binary system. Further, once you had one of these machines that could execute a given “program,” you could add programs until it could perform any function you wanted it to. Turing not only described the computer as we use it today, he gave us the math and function of how this could be performed before any hands had touched metal. He called it a Turing machine.

His paper was met with little fanfare until experiments began to take place in the US with “computers” and his paper ended up in their hands or in discussions on how to proceed. Little by little, Turings Computable Numbers became the seminal piece for the creation of computers.

In 1939, Turing saw the animated movie Snow White and wrote to friends about it. He memorized the lines the Witch said as she created her poison apple. Mostly due to the social discomfort attributed to being gay in a predominantly non gay world, Turing talked about suicide at various times in his life.

But, then came the war. At that time, Turing was teaching at Cambridge ( I think) and was snatched up by King and country to go to the now infamous Bletchley Park—the decoding center for the war effort. Turing’s theories were put to use in creating decoders for the German enigma machine, a machine that scrambled text so well and so randomly that the German’s were, to their demise, overly confident that no one would ever break the code. But this job was made for Turing and his intelligent machines. Decoding machines were created under his direction and ultimately a large machine was created called “the Collossus” that many have thought should be given the honor of being named the first computer. In one account I read that until the code was cracked, with the U boats keeping England under siege, it was thought that England had about two weeks worth of food left. I also read that Churchill made a tough decision once the code had been cracked not to warn the people of a particular town that they were about to be bombed, so as not to give away that they had cracked the code. That would be a call I would not want to make. With Turing’s machine, England was spared and the advantage turned to the allies, ultimately guiding their way to victory.

As you may have surmised, Turing’s end was not nearly as glorious as his heroic years at Bletchley Park. He was gay and as is often the case in intellectual circles, this never posed a big problem when he was at Cambridge amongst his colleagues. But, having strayed to a new job, working on a post war computer project (trying to think of what University) he picked up a man of questionable character and dated him for a while. His new friend arranged a robbery of his house with an accomplice and when Turing reported it to the police, it was quickly surmised that the two were involved. Turing was never one to tell a lie and so confessed as much. Homosexuality was illegal at that time in England and he was arrested.

At that time, experiments were being conducted with hormones to try and find a “cure” for homosexuality and one of the things that was found was that when men received estrogen that their sex drive was diminished. Turing was given a choice—jail or estrogen treatments. He chose estrogen treatments for the period of a year (I think) and went about his work. But he started changing physically--- he was growing breasts. Turing was a distance runner and often entered into competitions, even though he was a youngish forty something. He did not like having breasts.

It was also illegal for gays to work in classified areas as there was a fear that they could be blackmailed to give up government secrets. So, he was stripped of his clearances. No one is actually sure why he killed himself, as he left no note. He did not express sadness to his friends or that he was living in great shame or loneliness. But, he was found lying on his bed with a partially eaten apple laced with arsenic at his side.