Turing at the time of his election to Fellowship of the Royal Society. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
At last! The book was first announced in Publishers Weekly a…while ago. After a whole lot of work, Leland Purvis and my book about Alan Turing has begun to appear at Tor.com. Here’s our pitch from way back when:
“The atomic bomb shortened WWII by months, and the whole world knew it, instantly. The code-breakers at Bletchley Park shortened the war by years, but everyone who worked there remained anonymous and everything they did remained secret…for decades. As Winston Churchill put it, Bletchley people were the geese that ‘laid the golden egg, but never cackled.’
Flying at the head of Churchill’s flock was Alan Turing, the mathematician who cracked the German Enigma code. That alone would be enough to secure his place in history, but before the war he launched modern computer science via his creation of the Universal Turing Machine and after the war he created what is now known as the Turing Test, a benchmark for artificial intelligence. He called his test ‘The Imitation Game’.
He was also openly gay in a time and place where gays were treated criminally. And not just metaphorically — he killed himself with a cyanide-tainted apple after being convicted of homosexuality and forced to undergo estrogen treatment.
Our world is one of computers and secure communications, and Turing’s work is at the heart of both. He was an eccentric genius, an Olympic-class runner, a witty and clear communicator about complicated ideas, and open and honest to a fault. The secret he kept to safeguard his country could have saved him; the secret he refused to keep to save himself meant his destruction at the hands of that same country.”
We hope you enjoy it! Here’s that link again: The Imitation Game.
(I scheduled this post to appear at 10:01:01 local time. Binary and prime: I hope Alan Turing would approve.)
