“Sometimes it is the unexpected who do what no one else can.”
On June 23, 1912, an ordinary boy was born in a delivery room in Paddington, England.
At a time when science is confusing and new technologies are changing the way people communicate, and no one knows what will happen next, this boy was born into a world of confusion.
He learned to read in three weeks at the age of five, and to count in even less time, but by the age of nine he had failed to learn long division and enjoyed watching daisies and making “useless” scientific gizmos.
In 1926, he entered Sherborne, an Old English public school. That summer, May 3, 1926, was the first day of the General Strike in England, and all transport was stopped except the slow trains. While all around him was stuck in mud, he took advantage of the strike to enjoy two days of freedom – a 60-mile bike ride to school.
But the new boy, in his first week at public school, is bullied and lonely, and will be lonely and alienated for the rest of his life.
Nowadays, we often think campus life is the best because it is simple and free. The British public school, at that time, was a small state where the interests of the school were higher than the interests of the individual. Good, obedient students have a chance to become part of the country’s intellectual class, which this boy clearly did not belong to.
He was outside the system, thinking for himself, he was an anomaly in the eyes of others, a target of teasing and sarcasm, and no one around him seemed to understand the “dreaming” boy.
He’s a lonely freak. He’s a genius. He meets someone as smart as he is, changes his life, and then he loses the love of his life, so he’s left to trudge through the maze of math and machines.
In 1931, he entered King’s College, Cambridge, and won a scholarship. He was at the center of the scientific world, a place full of great masters, a place where rank and wealth meant nothing.
Thirty years ago, the brilliant mathematician David Hilbert said: mathematics knows no racial boundaries…… For mathematicians, the whole civilized world is one country.
He loved this otherworldly attitude to mathematics, and the strength he found in the world of mathematics was enough to support him against the disappointments of the real world.
As a top student at Cambridge, he showed no interest in politics at a time when everyone seemed to be able to take sides. He has his own path to freedom, and that is to work on his own career.
In 1936, his paper “On Computable Numbers and Their Applications to deterministic problems” was born, and those ideas, those repeated arguments and reflections, finally found their chance to explode at this moment.
He created a new set of models and frameworks, like Einstein and von neumann, a storm of imagination, challenging axioms rather than phenomena. Maybe this model isn’t entirely new, there’s been a lot of ideas before, and Natural Wonders says that the brain is like a machine, but what he’s done is, with precise, pure mathematical logic, he’s mapped out what a machine might look like in that naive brain. His machine – soon to be known as the “Turing machine” – built a bridge between abstract symbols and the physical world.
He was Alan Matheson Turing, the great British mathematician and father of computer science.
His achievements in mathematical logic and computer science form the basis of modern computer technology. He was a war hero who broke the German code, brought the war to an end two years early and saved at least tens of millions of lives. He came up with the Turing test, his idea of machine intelligence, which is one of the direct origins of artificial intelligence. He is the forerunner of modern artificial intelligence.
Innocent, upright, childlike, how could he have withstood so much torture and accomplished so much in such a troubled age?
He was a mathematician and gay, which was taboo in England at the time, and he was subjected to so many threats and intimidation that he was called “dirty” and “dirty”. His life was lonely because he was too smart, too focused on his ideals and seemed incompatible.
He spent the first half of his life saving the world, and the second half of his life suffering, he ate the poisoned apple, chose to leave the world, he is a crack code solver, and he is a riddle that no one can solve.
Now, as we study artificial intelligence, we have only just entered Turing’s dream. We are standing on the shoulders of giants looking out over the world, but the giants are forever resting on the ground beneath us.
He was born in June, he was gone in June.
You say I’m a riddle, but we’re all riddles,
It begins in pain and ends in torment.
Dragged to death by humble business,
To carry high ideals to the heavens.
This is from Alan Turing: The Solver of Riddles.
The first public account: Miss Wang