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Alan TuringThe Father of AI?: 

Alan Turing The Father of AI? 1912-1954 Turing was a brilliant mathematician, logician and one of the first computer scientists He is considered to have been one of the foremost thinkers in the foundations of Artificial Intelligence

Mathematics at the turn of the last century: 

Mathematics at the turn of the last century 1900: David Hilbert proposed a famous collection of open problems to mathematicians This was a period of incredible optimism and energy in mathematics – formalists such as Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead were attempting to formalise the foundations of mathematics

Hilbert’s 1920 Programme: 

Hilbert’s 1920 Programme In 1920 Hilbert formulated a programme of formalisation of the foundations of mathematics He proposed that it should be possible to provide a small set of axioms from which all mathematics could be derived He further proposed that it should be possible for mathematics to be reduced to applying a set of rules to these axioms to determine whether any given proposition is true or false

Kurt Gödel: 

Kurt Gödel In 1931, a little known Austrian logician demonstrated his famous Incompleteness Theorem which completely demolished Hilbert’s hopes: Any system as powerful as arithmetic must contain true propositions that cannot be proved! But that still left the Entscheidungsproblem: the problem of deciding whether a proposition is true or not

Turing’s Early Career: 

Turing’s Early Career Turing studied mathematics at Cambridge ’31-’34 and then went on to pursue a doctorate In ’36 he proved that Hilbert’s hopes were unfounded, by demonstrating the undecidability of the Halting Problem This showed that there are problems for which no computational procedure exists that can solve them To do this, Turing had to formalise a model of computation that is fully general: it captures all notions of computation it is still central to theoretical computer science and is now called the Turing Machine

World War II: 

World War II After Hitler’s Wermacht smashed through France in 1940, Britain stood alone against the strongest military power the world had ever known Throughout the war, Britain’s lifeline lay in her supply lines from the US and her colonies across the Atlantic Admiral Dönitz led the German U-boat fleet in a war of attrition against the British merchant navy

The Battle of the Atlantic: 

The Battle of the Atlantic Key to the U-boat tactics was the coordination by wireless Each U-boat would have to surface and communicate with Germany in order to receive news about the British convoys They would coordinate their attacks into wolf-packs that could hunt down the poorly defended ships and sink thousands of tons of shipping Secure communications were vital to this effort

Bletchley Park: 

Bletchley Park In 1939 Turing was recruited to join the cryptographers at Bletchley Park, a British Intelligence base The key work was to break the codes used by the German U-boats – a code based on the use of the Enigma machine

The Enigma: 

The Enigma The Enigma was a machine devised by German cryptographers in the ’20s It links keys to a series of rotor wheels that rotate as keys are typed Each key sends an electrical current through a wire that is laced through the rotor, connecting the input to a different position output The sequence of wheels encode the input as an output letter, like a substitution cypher, but with a dynamic property from the rotation of the wheels Code books determined the setting for some parts, but wheel settings were sent as first part of message

The Enigma: 

The Enigma

Code-breakers: 

Code-breakers Poles managed to break the Enigma before the war, but it was changed just after Chamberlain’s abortive “peace for our time” visit to Germany However, their efforts were critical in starting the Bletchley efforts At Bletchley, the earliest computers were devised and used in breaking the codes, using search

The Bombe: 

The Bombe Turing was one of the key designers of the machines used to break the code A great deal of luck was also required: captured codebooks from U-boats and foolish communications personnel contributed to the effort

Post-War: 

Post-War Turing went on to work at the National Physics Laboratory, designing one of the first real computers: ACE He also worked at Manchester University as deputy director of the computer laboratory During this period (’45-’54) he also produced some of the earliest work in AI: the Turing Test, speculations on Machine Intelligence and a chess-playing program

Turing beyond computing: 

Turing beyond computing Turing had a complex personal life He was unfortunate enough to be a homosexual in a period when it was illegal He was brought to the attention of the police after a former lover burgled his home He was sentenced to hormone treatment and became very depressed, eventually committing suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide

Alan Turing: 1912-1954: 

Alan Turing: 1912-1954