09-10-2010

"I can't feel my teeth."

-phobos

After nearly sixty years, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdoms has finally issued an apology for the “appalling” treatment of Alan Turing because of his homosexuality. Turing was forced to choose between prison or chemical castration for being gay. He chose the latter but two years later he killed himself with a poison apple. Thus ended the life of a brilliant man who was a philosopher, a WWII codebreaker, and a father of computer science. His work in breaking the German code during WWII proved pivotal at some major turning points of the war. His influence on computer science is so extensive that the highest honor in computer science is named the Turing Award, a oft-used theoretical model of a computer is called the Turing Machine, languages are said to be theoretically equivalent if they are Turing Complete, and a test of human level artificial intelligence is called the Turing Test. He also proofed the existence of undecidable problems with his famous Halting Problem. The Church-Turing thesis, which is nearly universally accepted, claims, in a sense, that any computable problem can be computed on a Turing Machine, thus leaving the possibility that all of reality is a giant simulation in a Turing machine.

His life was one of immense triumphs and a great tragedy. His brilliance was ignited by the death of his friend who he was in love with. In the end it was also love, a kind different from most but no doubt as genuine, that lead to his end. He is long dead and the man who apologized today was in no way connected to his treatment. Nonetheless, as a student and practitioner of computer science, it feels as though a wrong has been set right for a friend or even family member, even if he is no longer with us today.