This weekend marked the celebration of Alan Turing’s 100th birthday. Turing was one of the intellectual giants of the 20th century and made major contributions to cryptanalysis and started the theory of computability. He died shortly before his 42nd birthday from cyanide poisoning in what is widely believed to have been a suicide although some claim that it was an accident stemming from essentially a DIY bio experiment.
I have mentioned Turing repeatedly during the Tech Tuesday series and also in my mini review of James Gleick’s The Information. My plan is to write a more detailed post about Turing machines in the future as I have long promised (threatened?) to write some posts about the theoretical underpinnings of computer science. The Turing machine was meant to be a simple yet universal model of computation. That of course hasn’t stopped people from building actual Turing machines. Here is a video of a super elaborate one. And here is one made from Legos (of the Mindstorm variety). Google did a wonderful job with their Doodle, which was a functioning javascript implementation. Sadly the Doodle archive seems to contain only an image of it. Here instead is a – less pretty – but more functional Javascript based simulation to play with instead.
It is great to see Turing getting the recognition that he deserves. Last year I had the pleasure of giving the opening keynote for the now annual Turing Festival in Edinburgh. There is a petition to have Turing depicted on the 10 Pound note in the UK. I think that’s a wonderful idea as the 10 Pound note currently features another great British intellectual: Charles Darwin. I would love to see the Bank of England do this!
