FullOffice Learning has always believed in giving credit where credit is due — that's why we're honoring the life of the extraordinary mathematician, logician, theoretical computer scientist, and philosopher Alan Turing, who is considered one of the fathers of computer science and a pioneer of modern computing.
During World War II, he played a crucial role in helping the Allies crack the Nazis' secret communications. And before that, he had put forward an idea that transformed computers into the powerful, versatile machines they are today.
Early computers had the drawback of being built to solve one specific problem — if you wanted to use them for something else, you had to rewire the circuits. That was the case until 1936, when an English student, Alan Turing, conceived of a computer that could solve any problem, as long as that problem could be translated into mathematical expressions and then reduced to a chain of logical operations using binary numbers, where only two outcomes were possible: true or false.
The idea was to reduce everything to strings of ones and zeros and use a recipe — a program — to solve problems in very simple steps. The digital computer had been born, though for now it was still just an imaginary machine.
After World War II, during which he helped crack the Enigma code used to encrypt Nazi messages, Turing built one of the first computers resembling those we use today — one that was not only digital but also programmable, able to be used for many things just by changing the program.
To this day, no one has managed to create a program that passes that test, the Turing Test. By age 40, he had opened up the field of Artificial Intelligence — but in 1952, at the peak of his scientific career, he was arrested and convicted for having homosexual relationships. He was also denied access to Bletchley Park, the United Kingdom's codebreaking center, where Turing had worked during World War II.
To avoid going to prison, he chose to undergo treatment meant to reverse his natural impulses. Two years after beginning that so-called chemical castration "cure," Alan Turing took his own life on June 7, 1954. According to the autopsy, the cause of death was cyanide poisoning, and a half-eaten apple was found beside his body. Investigators concluded that Turing had injected the apple with cyanide before biting into it.
By the late 20th century, recognition of Turing's legacy had become much more widespread. In 2009, then–British Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an official apology to Alan Turing for the way he was treated.
The Royal Pardon came in August 2014, with the aim that “Turing be remembered for his war-time contributions and not for his later criminal conviction.” It was a symbolic, exceptional measure, since pardons are typically only granted when the convicted person is technically innocent. Queen Elizabeth II's royal decree set another process in motion: in February 2015, Turing's family requested a posthumous pardon for the nearly 50,000 other men convicted in Britain for homosexuality, which was a crime in that country from 1885 until 1967.