Alan Mathison Turing was born in Paddington, London, on June 23, 1912. He was a precocious child and began his interests in science and mathematics at a young age, but was never concerned about other right-brain classes such as English. This continued until an important friend of his passed away and set Turing on a path to achieve what his friend could no longer accomplish. When his friend Christopher Morcom died, Turing was launched into thoughts in physics about the physical mind being embodied in matter and whether quantum-mechanical theory affects the traditional problem of mind and matter. Many say today that this was the beginnings of Turing’s Turning Machine and the test still used today for artificial intelligence, the Turing Test.

Soon after his public schooling Turing began working on his undergraduate at King’s College. Here he became interested in the readings of Von Neumann’s quests into the logical foundations of qua

At around 1967 he began to explore the relationships of computers and nature, an all new concept, initiating his beginnings in artificial intelligence. Turing was convinced that by the year 2000, a fully animated thinking machine, a machine that would replicate human thought patterns would be in existence. In 1949 he published one of his more popular papers, “Intelligent Machines.” From his new ideas in artificial intelligence he sparked many heated debates with other scientists and new notions that are still discussed today about the moral aspect of creating a machine that has a thought process equal to that of a human.

Turing continued working on the digital computer and ideas in artificial intelligence until he died on June 7, 1954. He was found with a half-eaten apple loaded with cyanide, the half-eaten apple a familiar symbol of innocence. Some say he had committed suicide over an embarrassing incident with a 19-year old student, while his mother says he was just performing another experiment with household chemicals and became careless. Whichever it may be, Alan Turing passed away and left the world with many raw ideas to work out. In my opinion, the biggest contribution that he left with us was his idea of a single machine running off a finite number of algorithms to perform multiple tasks. This being the vision of the computers we all use today.

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