On: Alan Turing

by: Joshua Howell

Sherborne School
Like most geniuses of his stature, the young Alan Turing was confined to a school useless for his fomentation. 

Which isn’t to criticize Sherborne, Alan’s alma mater; it was at the forefront of 20^th century education. It existed both to instruct England’s brightest and to introduce them to the complexities of life. But out of necessity, it was also a place where the hard sciences were lowly and the soft sciences were supreme. For the mathematically minded Alan, it was hell.

A teacher once called Alan’s work “slipshod,”  “dirty” and “inconsistent,” which could all be forgiven if not for the “stupidity of his attitude towards sane discussion on the New Testament.”

But, lest there be some mistake, Alan was hard at work. Disregarding his assignments, and with that exuberance only found in the young, the burgeoning intellectual instead satiated his mind by calculating pi to thirty-six places, rediscovering the series for the inverse tangent function and giving expert derivations of The Law of Geodesic Motion.

And add to Alan’s obstacles this: as he progressed through puberty, he found himself attracted to those of the same sex.

The young Alan Turing

So when Alan met Christopher Morcom, a student one year older than he, the boy was smitten. Christopher was a perfect storm of attractiveness: unabashedly suave, well spoken and, most keenly to Alan, of a similar scientific mentality. Had Sherborne admitted women, Christopher would have been the stuff of every girl’s dreams. Serendipitously, he was the stuff of Alan’s.

Like a modern-day high school student, haplessly swept away by that striking face, Alan rearranged his class schedule so they could more often be together, and frequently joined Christopher in the library for revision.

Christopher Morcom

By the hand, Christopher was guiding Alan through the labyrinth of their institution. Whereas Alan felt Sherborne was tying him down, as if he were a sailor fixed to a sinking ship, Christopher navigated the institution successfully, securing a plethora of scholarships and awards. His self-confidence and gift of speech allowed the older to say things from which the younger would shy away. 

There was a place for Alan at Sherborne, it seemed, and it was wherever Christopher happened to be.

And so, when Christopher died suddenly in February of 1930, three years after the two had met, one needn’t describe Alan’s grief. In a letter to his mother, Alan, waxing sentimental, wrote:

“I feel sure that I shall meet Morcom again somewhere and that there will be some work for us to do together, as I believed there was for us to do here. Now that I am left to do it alone I must not let him down but put as much energy into it, if not as much interest as if he were still here. If I succeed, I shall be more fit to enjoy his company than I am now.”

Alan, per Sherborne’s mission, had been introduced to the complexities of life.

King’s College
Unlike his public school, King’s College was conducive to Turing’s brand of unfettered thought. Said John Maynard Keynes, who had provided an endowment for the University: “We claimed the right to judge every individual case on its merits, and the wisdom, experience and self-control to do so successfully.” It was the school’s most “dangerous characteristic.”

Turing at King's College

In the same decade Keynes transformed modern economic thought, Turing transformed ideas on computability. It took him a terse 17 words: “It is possible,” he wrote, “to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence.”

 “Turing Machines,” as they were termed, are the conceptual equivalent of modern day computers. Imagine a small device which is fed a narrow strip of paper. The paper is subdivided into “squares” and within each square is printed a small symbol. One at a time, the machine reads each symbol, interprets some predefined instruction, and performs it. Such an instruction might change the machine’s configuration, command the machine to skip forward or backward, or write new instructions.

Today, we might understand the device as a computer, the symbols as a program, and the paper as a compact disk on which said program is stored.

But what elevated Turing from mere genius to the level of Einstein was his ability to define both the reaches and limits of “computability.”

Any Turing Machine, he found, no matter how simple, could simulate the process of any other Turing Machine, no matter how complex, so long as it had sufficient memory. The implication: unimaginably complex tasks could be performed on the simplest of machines.

And yet there remained a  bold line pass which no computer could go. It is known as the ENTSCHEIDUNGSPROBLEM (or the “halting problem”), and is still taught in modern computer science courses.

Consider three strips of paper. On the first is stored Program One, on the second, Program Two, and on the third, the input needed for Program Two to run. Program Two can do some arbitrary task, but Program’s One’s job is to determine whether Program Two will ever finish running -- or “halt” -- on the given input.

Turing proved that, due to a contradiction in the underlying logic of  computability, it was impossible for Program One to exist.

It’s one of the more intriguing findings in computer science: In the same paper, Turing not only expanded the idea of computability, he  simultaneously confirmed that no program could ascertain whether another was doing its job correctly.

Life’s paradoxes are always the most perplexing.

His later years
Reading through his personal documents and biographies, there’s little evidence to suggest that many were aware of Turing’s homosexuality. It is unclear whether Christopher Morcom knew, and Joan Clarke, a close friend and one-time fiancé of his, had most likely deduced it before Turing informed her and called off the engagement.

Such secrecy was borne out of necessity. For nearly 100 years homosexual acts had been illegal in England. Under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, men could be imprisoned for up to two years for “gross indecency” with another man either “in public or in private.” Like most laws, “gross indecency” was comparatively ambiguous, with one exception: it could not be construed to include sodomy. That, the law made clear, was a separate and more heinous crime.

Therefore, any thoughts as to why, after years of secrecy, Turing felt compelled to risk his livelihood can only remain speculation.

It was 1952 when, like a spool of thread, his life became unwound. Outside a movie theater in Manchester, Turing met Arnold Murray, a man some years younger than he. The two would later go on a lunch date and Murray would twice visit Turing’s home -- the second time spending the night.

It was not a romance meant to last. Some time afterward, Murray broke into Turing’s house while he was away. During questioning by the police,  Turing admitted to the nature of his relationship with Murray.

It is entirely possible that he feared Murray would tell the police if he didn’t. Just as plausible is that Turing, less than six months removed from 40, simply found himself incapable of continuing his heterosexual charade.

Regardless, he was given two options, either he would be imprisoned or forced into a hormonal treatment of synthetic estrogen, the equivalent of chemical castration. He chose the latter.

Two years later, on June 7^th 1954, a month shy of his 42^nd birthday, Turing committed suicide via cyanide poisoning. He was discovered by his housekeeper the next day.

100 years on
Today, a century to the date of Mr. Turing’s birthday, homosexuality is now permissible in England, and Prime Minister David Cameron is on record in support of same-sex marriage. His remarks deserves to be reprinted in full, sans interruption.

“I once stood before a Conservative conference and said it shouldn't matter whether commitment was between a man and a woman, a woman and a woman, or a man and another man. You applauded me for that. Five years on, we're consulting on legalizing gay marriage.

“And to anyone who has reservations, I say: Yes, it's about equality, but it's also about something else: commitment. Conservatives believe in the ties that bind us; that society is stronger when we make vows to each other and support each other. So I don't support gay marriage despite being a Conservative. I support gay marriage because I'm a Conservative.”

Wherever they are, whatever they’re working on, Christopher and Alan are surely glad, the latter more than fit to enjoy the former’s company.