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Alan Turing on the future

“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”
Alan M. Turing (1950). “Computing machinery and intelligence.” Mind, 59, 433-460.
If only that future had included many more years of Turing, and the products of his genius.
Posted in honor of The Imitation Game by Leland Purvis and me…read it at Tor.com, which concludes its online run today. Thanks to Leland most of all, but also Irene Gallo and Chris Lough at Tor.com, Joan Hilty, Nick Abadzis, and everyone else who made this possible. 

More advice from the United States War Department (1942)

“A British woman officer or non-commissioned officer can — and often does — give orders to a man private. The men obey smartly and know it is no shame. For British women have proven themselves in this way. They have stuck to their posts near burning ammunition dumps, delivered messages afoot after their motorcycles have been blasted from under them. They have pulled aviators from burning planes. They have died at gun posts and as they fell another girl has stepped directly into the position and “carried on.” There is not a single record in this war of any British woman in uniformed service quitting her post or failing to do her duty under fire.
“Now you understand why British soldiers respect the women in uniform. They have won the right to the utmost respect. When you see a girl in khaki or air-force blue with a bit of ribbon on her tunic — remember she didn’t get it for knitting more socks than anyone else in Ipswich.”
Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain 1942, issued by the United States War Department in 1942, published by the Bodelian Library, University of Oxford, in 2004 (ISBN 1-85124-085-3)

Alan Turing on brains, machines, and porridge

“[W]e are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge. We don’t want to say ‘This machine’s quite hard, so it isn’t a brain, so it can’t think.'”
Alan Turing (1952). “Can automatic calculating machines be said to think?” BBC Third Programme, 14 and 23 Jan. 1952, discussion between M.H.A. Newman, Alan M. Turing, Sir Geoffrey Jefferson, and R.B. Braithwaite.

Advice from the United States War Department (1942)

“Don’t be misled by the British tendency to be soft-spoken and polite. If they need to be, they can be plenty tough. The English language didn’t spread across the oceans and over the mountains and jungles and swamps of the world because these people were panty-waists.”
Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain 1942, issued by the United States War Department in 1942, published by the Bodelian Library, University of Oxford, in 2004 (ISBN 1-85124-085-3)

New story: “The Imitation Game” is here

Turing at the time of his election to Fellowsh...

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.)