Alan Turing Biography

1884 Words8 Pages
Who was the scientist that broke the Enigma Machine’s code? Alan Turing was the scientist that accomplished this goal. His awkward childhood led to him excelling in school. With his father working for the British Civil Service in India, where his mother and Turing’s father spent their lives for the majority of his childhood (Alan Turing 2054). While his parents were away, Turing and his older brother attended the Sherborne School, a well known boarding school, where he became intrigued with the fields of mathematics and science (Alan Turing Biography). Thanks to his parents leaving him and his brother alone in a boarding school, all of his time was dedicated to his studies. His education left him to accomplish one of the greatest accomplishments…show more content…
The progress at the National Physical Laboratory was causing Turing dissatisfaction and this would cause him to leave the NPL and accept a job at Manchester University where an enormous computer called the Mark I was in the building process (Byers 349). He would be giving an important role in this operation. He would take the position of Chief Programmer of the project and this would allow him to make the Mark I complete mathematics equations, play chess and other games of skill, investigate automatic language translation and be able to do cryptanalysis (Byers 349). He could do all of this due to his position with the project. For the Mark I project, Alan Turing took the position of Chief Programmer and this allowed him to do whatever he fancied to the supercomputer (Byers 349). Having this computer do an array of different tasks would become very important. This would be the first major attempt to use a stored program computer for non-computational activities (Byers 349). Turing would also have one last important contribution to the technology world. Alan Turing's creation of a simple machine would leave his mark in the computer…show more content…
He composed a test to evaluate the intelligence of a normal human, which was called the Turing Test (Shyamasundar 1678). This test would involve three people. Originally the test had a man, women and a judge in a different room and while in those rooms the judge would question both the man and women for five minutes, but at the end, the judge had to decided which one was the man and which was the women just based on the questions the judge asked (Shyamasundar 1678). Sadly, the test was not as simple as it seemed. There was a catch, the man was trying to fool the judge and act like the women, while the women would try and help the judge make the right decision (Shyamasundar 1678). However the test all depended on the man. Turing stated that if the man was a decent impersonator, that he could fool the judge fifty percent of the time, but the judge seemed to be correct about seventy percent of the time (Shyamasundar 1678). The judge was very good at deciding which of the two people were actually the man, but how well would those decisions be if the man was

More about Alan Turing Biography

Open Document