Alan Turing was one of the most important computer scientists of the 20th century. He contributed not only to the foundations of the study of artificial intelligence, but played an important–perhaps the most important–role in the British World War II code-breaking effort that was headquartered at Bletchley Park, north of London. After the war was over, Turing continued his work in both the civilian and military worlds and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1951.
Turing was gay, a not unusual situation for a British intellectual of the period. That latter did not help, however, when he was arrested and convicted in 1952 of “gross indecency” for his relationship with a young Manchester man. This was the same crime for which Oscar Wilde had been convicted more than half a century previously.
Turing’s choice was jail or probation contingent on him being “chemically castrated” through regular injections of estrogen. He chose the latter, and remained out of jail. But the Cold War panic over security meant that the government would no longer give security clearances for avowed homosexuals. The rationale was that they could be easily blackmailed by the Soviets, though logic would suggest that avowed homosexuals no longer had anything about which to be blackmailed. Despite that rather obvious conclusion, Turing’s security clearance was revoked and he was forbidden from working on military cryptanalysis projects.
On June 8, 1954, Turing’s cleaning lady found Turing dead in bed. He had ingested potassium cyanide, whether accidentally (as his mother insisted) or deliberately (as most others seem to think).
And there things might have remained, an appalling story of injustice rapidly fading into the depths of the past. Might have, except John Graham-Cummings, a programmer of some repute, decided to mount a petition to try and get the British government to apologize for its treatment of Turing. He did not expect to succeed in this obscure and perhaps quixotic quest, but he pushed hard at publicizing the petition, and last week, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Gordon Brown, called him:
A few minutes later the phone rang and a soft Scottish voice said: “Hello John. It’s Gordon Brown. I think you know why I am calling you”. And then he went on to tell me why. He thanked me for starting the campaign, spoke about a “wrong that he been left unrighted too long”, said he thought I was “brave” (not sure why) and spoke about the terrible consequences of homophobic laws and all the people affected by them.
That same day, the PM released a statement of apology:
While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.
Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate – by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices – that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.
So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.
The apology cannot, of course, stand in for justice at the time. It is nonetheless some small form of redemption, for the British government more than Turing, who himself actually needed nothing in the way of absolution.
22 comments
September 22, 2009 at 3:56 pm
ucblockhead
One shouldn’t be pleased to apologize for the despicable behavior of one’s nation. It makes it sound like opportunistic politics not heartfelt apology.
September 22, 2009 at 4:39 pm
Vance
He’s also “proud to say we’re sorry”. It is strange — more like self-congratulation, or an attempt to comfort himself in the act of acknowledging something painful.
September 22, 2009 at 5:50 pm
redfoxtailshrub
Yes, that “pleased to have the chance to say” and “proud to say” business clangs horribly. What a strange thing to say (to say).
Alan Turing may be the historical figure whose life story is most apt to make me cry. He was so brilliant and his fate was just so heartbreaking and poignant and senseless and awful, and he came so near the time when his outing would have mattered so much less. His writing style is very appealing and engaging, too, which makes me that much fonder of (my idea of) him. There’s a theory, isn’t there, that he killed himself as he did for the very purpose of giving his mother the option of thinking it was an accident?
September 22, 2009 at 5:52 pm
redfoxtailshrub
Also, it’s a bit odd, surely, to call him “Alan”? Or did Gordon Brown meet him as a toddler?
September 22, 2009 at 6:26 pm
snarkout
It’s not just “the foundations of the study of artificial intelligence”; his work on the halting problem as work towards answer Hilbert’s question of decidability* led him to define “Turing machines”, which remain to this day the building block of theoretical computer science. He basically invented programming as a thought experiment.
* Which is, effectively, “Is there a method for determining the truth or falsehood of mathematical statement?” All due deference to Alonzo Church, father of the lambda calculus, who’s sort of the Liebnitz to Turing’s Newton. Hilbert defined three properties he thought axiomatic mathematics ought to have: completeness, correctness, and decidability: every true theorem should be provable; no false theorem should be provable; and you should be able to distinguish the truth values even when you can’t construct the proof. Goedel showed that you can’t have correctness and completeness simultaneously, and Turing and Church extended his work to show that you can’t have decidability.
September 22, 2009 at 6:33 pm
ari
Nerd.
September 22, 2009 at 6:43 pm
snarkout
Back to the Renaissance Faire with you, history boy.
September 22, 2009 at 6:46 pm
ari
Fair maidens! Mead! Broadswords! What’s not to love?
September 22, 2009 at 6:50 pm
kathy a.
the clanginess of the words surely doesn’t outweigh the sentiments of regret about how turing was treated, and acknowleging his enormous contributions.
some phrasing sounds like standard conventions of a statement of recognition, rendered awkward because this is not a conventional situation. referring to turing as “alan” sounds dismissive, but may have been the PM’s attempt to emphasize that he has strong personal feelings about the injustice. i’m inclined to give benefit of the doubt. the PM could have looked the other way without anyone noticing, but decided otherwise.
September 22, 2009 at 6:53 pm
redfoxtailshrub
Yeah, I was feeling that I’d been a bit churlish, there. The apology as a whole is really very lovely.
September 22, 2009 at 7:32 pm
max
He basically invented programming as a thought experiment.
Ada Lovelace?
max
[‘Nor even a skull to drink from.’]
September 22, 2009 at 10:33 pm
Colin
I find the first-naming of historical figures weird too (my students sometimes do it — maybe I’m old fashioned). But on the whole yes, a great statement.
September 23, 2009 at 3:27 am
ajay
I find the first-naming of historical figures weird too (my students sometimes do it — maybe I’m old fashioned).
Quite right. It’s “Bonaparte”, damn it.
September 23, 2009 at 4:35 am
Charlieford
“a not unusual situation for a British intellectual of the period.”
Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
September 23, 2009 at 8:14 am
dana
Using “proud” didn’t make much sense, but I figure he had to have meant something like “deeply honored to be the person to be fortunate enough to have the chance to apologize to the great Turing for our collective mistake.” Which is still an awkward sentiment. But.
September 23, 2009 at 9:55 am
Jake
Didn’t Lovelace invent the programmable computer (ie the FPGA) while Turing invented the general-purpose CPU (shared memory and data)?
September 23, 2009 at 10:06 am
silbey
I kind of liked Gordon Brown’s apology. It’s distinctly different from a lot of apologies, and I do think the “proud” is a reference to the idea that “hey, we screwed up badly and I’m glad to get a chance to set it (at least partly) right.”
September 23, 2009 at 10:51 am
dave
A posthumous knighthood would have been better than an ‘apology’ which smacks of self-congratulation, and might be read by a cynic as a desperate grab at free kudos from a Prime Minister so deeply unpopular that ‘dead man walking’ would be an optimistic diagnosis. Mind you, a posthumous knighthood, with the accompanying hoopla, would smack of…
Guess Brown can’t win…
September 23, 2009 at 12:31 pm
rea
Quite right. It’s “Bonaparte”, damn it.
Not to mention “Windsor.”
September 23, 2009 at 3:52 pm
snarkout
Jake is entirely correct, but I didn’t think I could explain the distinction succinctly.
September 24, 2009 at 5:43 am
Tom
Not to mention “Windsor.”
Hah. I want to see someone call the Queen “Mrs. Windsor.”
September 24, 2009 at 6:31 am
ajay
Not to mention “Windsor.”
Well, there’s quite a lot of Windsors, so that wouldn’t work as well…
Didn’t Lovelace invent the programmable computer (ie the FPGA) while Turing invented the general-purpose CPU (shared memory and data)?
IIRC what Lovelace did was basically “assume that a programmable computer, the Babbage Analytic Engine, exists: here is the sort of terminology and logic which you would need to program it”.
Turing’s contribution was to show mathematically that a general-purpose computer with sufficient capacity could emulate the behaviour of any specialist computer – so you wouldn’t need to have in your office, for example, an adding-and-subtracting machine, an alphabetical-address-sorting machine, a record-keeping machine and an average-calculating machine, because you could configure your general purpose computer to be any of them. (Though a specialist machine might still be faster, of course.)