Turing week

Next Saturday, June 23, marks 100 years since the birth of Alan Turing. At La Naturaleza del Software (The Nature of Software) we will celebrate with a marathon of 7 posts starting tomorrow, but by way of invitation I leave you this video where we see the great British actor Derek Jacobi playing Turing, explaining his great contribution to mathematics. I also leave you a video and a text written by Eduardo Galeano about this genius of the twentieth century. I’ll be waiting for you.

This other video is part of a talk Eduardo Galeano gave in Los Angeles in June 2009. The text below is taken from his book Mirrors:

The father of computers

by Eduardo Galeano (via the Argentine Pirate Party)

For not being a man, what you’d call a real man, a man with hair on his chest, Alan Turing was condemned. He screeched, he squawked, he stuttered. He wore an old necktie for a belt. He slept little and went days without shaving, and he would run across cities from one end to the other while working out complicated mathematical formulas in his head.

Working for British intelligence, a few years earlier, he had helped shorten the Second World War when he invented the machine capable of deciphering the indecipherable codes of Germany’s military high command.

By then he had already imagined a prototype of an electronic computer and had laid the theoretical foundations of modern computer science. Later he led the construction of the first computer that operated with stored programs. With it he played endless games of chess, asked it questions that drove it crazy, and demanded that it write him love letters.

The machine obeyed, putting out rather incoherent messages.

But it was flesh-and-blood policemen who took him away in 1952, in Manchester, for gross indecency.

Put on trial, Turing pleaded guilty to homosexuality.

To be let go, he agreed to undergo a treatment to cure him.

The barrage of drugs left him impotent. He grew breasts. He shut himself in. He no longer went to the university. He heard murmurs, he felt stares that shot him in the back.

Before going to sleep, as was his habit, he ate an apple.

One night, he injected cyanide into the apple he was about to eat.