Full transcript
0:06Alan Mat Turing was born in London on
0:09the 23rd of June 1912.
0:14He had a modest upbringing but shunned
0:17the curriculum taught at his school in
0:19favor of his own ideas about the
0:21underlying logic of the mathematical
0:23world.
0:25Inspiration for Turing's life work came
0:27when his best friend Christopher Morham
0:30died of tuberculosis in 1930.
0:34This prompted Turing to develop a
0:36fascination with the philosophical idea
0:38of the human spirit continuing beyond
0:41death.
0:42His adult work developed against this
0:45background as he investigated whether
0:47machines were capable of logical
0:49humanlike intelligence.
0:56To do this, Turing conceived of a
0:59machine which was capable of solving any
1:01problem using logical steps.
1:04>> Now, in 1935, there were no such
1:06machines. This is just an imaginary
1:08machine. It's a machine of thought. But
1:11he made it into an absolutely definite
1:13idea and it's the idea of the Turing
1:15machine.
1:19Turing's greatest theoretical invention,
1:21the universal Turing machine, was based
1:24on a step-by-step problem-solving
1:26process called an algorithm.
1:30An algorithm starts with an input and
1:32dictates the specific processes that
1:35must be performed to reach a final
1:37output.
1:46In Turing's theoretical example, an
1:48infinitely long piece of tape would feed
1:51into a machine.
1:53The machine's finite processes would
1:55dictate whether a one or a zero would be
1:58read, written, or erased on the tape.
2:04It was a simple algorithm.
2:25As well as devising these theoretical
2:28machines, Turing developed a test to
2:30determine whether a machine had achieved
2:32intelligence comparable to a human. His
2:35idea was that a human judge would engage
2:38in conversation with a computer and a
2:40human. When a judge could not tell which
2:43was the human, true artificial
2:46intelligence would have been born.
2:53The algorithmic machine dreamt up by
2:55Turing has become a reality. Algorithms
2:59form the basis of computer programs
3:01today.
3:03Yet, whilst many computers have been put
3:05to Turing's intelligence test since his
3:07death, none have passed.
3:11Despite dying from suspected suicide at
3:14the age of 41, Turing has personally
3:17achieved what he could not achieve for
3:19his friend,
3:21immortality through his legacy as the
3:23founding father of computer science.