Tortured Genius

I like the Urban Dictionary, partly because I find the definitions it offers are fun, even if they are not always strictly accurate or ‘proper’.  Here is what it has to say about a ‘tortured genius’: “You are smart. Brilliant in fact. And while it’s a blessing, it’s also a curse. Your head is filled with everything – grand ideas, insufferable worries, and a good deal of angst.  You’re uniquely brilliant – and completely misunderstood.  Not like you really want anyone to understand you anyway.  You’re pretty happy being an island.” [i]

Now, I wasn’t getting ideas above my station, but I was thinking about a tortured genius as I read, once more, about Alan Turing.  A fascinating man, he was certainly extra-ordinarily brilliant (I would have used the word genius, but it has been somewhat debased by overuse).  As to whether he was tortured, that’s a topic I will return to a little later. Like Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose form of relaxation was to sit alone in the cinema watching films (often, it is said, seeing the same film several times at one sitting), Turing was another rather solitary figure.  Yes, he was something of an island, and certainly often misunderstood, frequently by others and even by himself on a few occasions.

Most of the facts of his life have been well covered in books and films.  Alan Hodge’s biography, ‘The Enigma’, is a comprehensive account of Alan Turing’s life and work, and he has continued to research further details of his activities. [ii]  Many others have written about Turing, especially the time he spent at Bletchley Park, the centre for code-breaking in the Second World War.  The events lend themselves to a dramatic biopic: the story includes an amazing brain, a homosexual, a key figure in breaking secret German codes in the Second World War, a suicide.  It sounds like the script for film, ideal for one of those brainier actors.  Indeed, it was Benedict Cumberbatch who played Alan Turing in the 2014 film, The Imitation Game, an ideal choice: who could be better than a former Sherlock Holmes!  Films must make choices, however, and sometimes it is some of the detail dropped from a script that offers more detailed insight than can be found in the ‘big’ story.

Alan Turing also became a figure in fiction, especially in David Lagercrantz’s book ‘The Fall of Man in Wilmslow: A Novel of Alan Turing’. [iii]  A clever novel, it starts on June 8, 1954, the day when Alan Turing is found dead in his home in the small town of Wilmslow a few miles south of Manchester.  In the novel, as in reality, his death is quickly determined by the police to be a suicide. To quote from the book summary: “Investigators assumed he purposely ate a cyanide-laced apple because he was unable to cope with the humiliation of his criminal conviction for gross indecency. But Leonard Corell, a young detective constable who once dreamed of a career in higher mathematics, suspects greater forces are involved. In the face of opposition from his superiors and in the paranoid atmosphere of the Cold War, he inches closer to the truth and to one of the most closely guarded secrets of the Second World War—what was going on at Bletchley Park. With state secrets swirling in his mind and a growing fear that he is under surveillance, Corell realizes that he has much to learn about the dangers of forbidden knowledge.”  It makes for a compelling tale, exploring Corell’s reaction to the unfolding events, and, almost incidentally retelling and elaborating on the events from before and after Turing’s death.

Famous for his time at Bletchley Park, there are three other phases of Turing’s life that tend to receive less coverage: developing the software to enable computers, morphogenesis, and the reason he was arrested for gross indecency.  I won’t avoid some comments on the more familiar wartime work, but, to go back to the beginning, Alan Turing was born in 1912, and events conspired to encourage a solitary nature.  His parents wanted Alan and his brother to be educated in the UK, but his father’s position in the British Civil Service saw his mother and father shuttle between England and India, while the children stayed with a retired Army couple.  If that wasn’t enough, being outstanding at school was another reason to make him stand out and apart.  Turing’s natural inclination towards mathematics and science did not earn him respect from some of the teachers at Sherborne, an independent secondary boarding school, where the classics were considered the core of a good education. His headmaster wrote to his parents: “I hope he will not fall between two stools. If he is to stay at public school, he must aim at becoming educated.  If he is to be solely a Scientific Specialist, he is wasting his time at a public school” [iv]  I love the certainty of an English school teacher.

He didn’t waste his time, but he did experience trauma.  At Sherborne, he became friends with another student, Christopher Morcom, who was to die from tuberculosis while still a student.  Much has been written about their relationship, suggesting it might have been an unfulfilled homosexual one.  For certain, Morcom’s death upset Turing, pushing him to study even harder.  He contacted Morcom’s mother: “I am sure I could not have found anywhere another companion so brilliant and yet so charming and unconceited. I regarded my interest in my work, and in such things as astronomy (to which he introduced me) as something to be shared with him and I think he felt a little the same about me … I know I must put as much energy if not as much interest into my work as if he were alive, because that is what he would like me to do.”  Turing and Mrs Morcom kept in contact for several years. [v]

In 1931, Alan Turing left Sherborne for the far more accepting world of King’s College, Cambridge, to study mathematics (and incidentally to find a home in one of the most congenial places for homosexuals in the UK!).  Andrew Hodge’s talk on Turing reveals he was interviewed by Keynes when being considered for admissions, who observed, critically, that Turing’s fingernails were unacceptable!  Despite concerns, he was in, and by 1935 he was elected a Fellow of the college, and a year later was off to Princeton at the age of 23.

It was at Princeton that Turing worked on issues to do with ‘computable numbers’ (and, yes, I have no idea what the issues were), but it did lead him to conceptualise a ‘Universal Machine’ (now known as a universal Turing machine) a machine capable of computing anything that is computable (tautological?).  Even if the implications weren’t obvious to most people at the time, he was establishing the principles which lay behind the software that drives computers.

To jump ahead in time, Turing worked after the war at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington on the development of the electronic computer (the Automatic Computing Engine, ACE), but he was frustrated by the focus the team gave to hardware, and eventually returned to Cambridge.  This resulted in the competitors, a US team led by John von Neumann, completing their machine first.  However, von Neumann was quick to acknowledge that the central concept of the modern computer was due to Turing’s work, and it still the case that ‘Turing machines’ remain central to the study of computation.

In 1948, Turing took up a position at the Victoria University of Manchester, and in 1949 he became Deputy Director of the Computing Machine Laboratory, where he worked on software for one of the earliest computers, writing the initial edition of the Programmer’s Manual.  While his work wandered on to other topics, he continued to contribute to software development.  As part of that effort, he proposed an experiment that became known as the Turing test, which was a means to determine if a machine could be called ‘intelligent’. The idea is that a computer is said to think if a human questioner cannot tell it apart, through conversation, from a human being.[vi]  He also suggested that the ideal way to design a computer was to create a machine that used simple logic, and then educate it:  this is exactly what ‘self-learning’ software does today, allowing computer to learn from other players of chess, say, or Go.  As we have seen, eventually computers can become better than those from whom they learnt. [vii] . By the way, a clever and reverse form of the Turing test is widely used on the Internet; when you use an online process, you may be asked to complete a CAPTCHA test, a test to determine if you are a human or a computer!

In the midst of all that excitement, we have bypassed Turing at Bletchley Park, the site of the Government Code and Cypher School.  This is the core of so many of the television programs and movies about Alan Turing, and his contribution is now very well-known.  Using results from a Polish codebreaking bureau, he deciphered Enigma coded messages, one of five major advances Turing made during the war using statistical techniques to optimise testing different possibilities in the code breaking process.  His innovative approach led to two papers on his mathematical strategies, The Applications of Probability to Cryptography and Paper on Statistics of Repetitions, both of such value to government they were not released to the UK’s National Archives until 2012, one hundred years after his birth. At the time, a government mathematician said “the fact that the contents had been restricted shows what a tremendous importance it has in the foundations of our subject. … The papers detailed using mathematical analysis to try and determine which are the more likely settings so that they can be tried as quickly as possible.”  They had been released because the government had “squeezed the juice out of the two papers and was happy for them to be released into the public domain”. [viii]

A tortured genius?  At least an odd one.  At Bletchley Park Turing was known to his colleagues as “Prof” and his analyses of codes was known as the “Prof’s Book”. [ix]  For those of you who like odd facts (as I do) it appears he was a talented long-distance runner and would sometimes run the 40 miles to London for meetings.  Turing tried out for the 1948 British Olympic team but was hampered by an injury. His time for the marathon was only 11 minutes slower than British silver medallist Thomas Richards’ Olympic race time of 2 hours 35 minutes. He was Walton Athletic Club’s best runner, a fact revealed when he passed their group while running alone. [x]  Marathons seems to fit his character: determined and solitary!

If my first topic concerns Alan Turing and software, my second is about another area of mathematics.  In 1951, he turned his attention to mathematical biology, and the explanation of patterns and shapes in biological organisms, or morphogenesis.  To work on this, Turing used non-linear differential equations, an approach we would tackle today using a powerful computer, something unavailable in 1951, and so he had to solve the equations by hand. His approximations gave the right qualitative results and were published before the structure and role of DNA was understood.  His work is still relevant and is considered a key advance in mathematical biology.  How is it used?  I read that one of the early applications of Turing’s paper was the work by James Murray explaining spots and stripes on the fur of cats, large and small. [xi] Further research in the area suggests that Turing’s work can partially explain the growth of “feathers, hair follicles, the branching pattern of lungs, and even the left-right asymmetry that puts the heart on the left side of the chest.” [xii]  So now you know.

My last topic concerns Turing’s homosexuality.  It was a story of bad luck and bad timing, culminating in January 1952 when Turing had started a relationship with Arnold Murray, a 19-year-old unemployed man, after meeting him just before Christmas 1951.  In January, his house was burgled.  Murray told Turing he knew the burglar, and Alan reported the burglary to the police.  During the investigation, he admitted his sexual relationship with Murray.  It is almost impossible to understand why Turing had decided to confess his homosexuality when he reported the burglary: he would have known homosexual acts were criminal offences in the United Kingdom at the time.  Some have concluded he felt he wouldn’t be prosecuted; others that he was naïve.  Andrew Hodges suggested that he may have believed the law was about to change.  Whatever the reason, his honesty, and perhaps his ignorance of much of the world around him, led to a charge of gross indecency, a charge based on his own evidence.

Convicted in March 1952, he was given a choice between imprisonment or probation. He chose probation, which entailed undergoing a course of hormone injections, designed to reduce his libido, resulting in impotence.  Murray was given a conditional discharge.  Once sentenced, Turing lost his security clearance and was barred from continuing with his cryptographic consultancy for the government.  He was denied entry into the United States after his conviction, but he was free to visit other European countries.  Another restriction, but in this case like everyone who had worked at Bletchley Park, was that he was prevented by the Official Secrets Act from discussing his war work (a restriction that only began to be lifted in 1975).  Turing died in 1954, and the evidence makes it clear it was a suicide. [xiii]

A sad end to a brilliant life, but Turing was to make one more contribution.  On 26 July 2012, a bill was introduced in parliament to grant a statutory pardon to Turing for his conviction.  Before the bill could be debated in the House of Commons, the government elected to use the royal prerogative of mercy and on 24 December 2013, the Queen signed a pardon for his sentence for “gross indecency”, with immediate effect.  Announcing the pardon, the Lord Chancellor said Turing deserved to be “remembered and recognised for his fantastic contribution to the war effort” and not for his later criminal conviction. [xiv]   Pardons are normally granted only when the person is technically innocent, and a request has been made by the family or other interested party; but neither condition was met in this case. In 2016, the government expanded this to others sentenced for similar historical indecency offences, in what was called the ‘Alan Turing law’, an informal term for the process to retroactively pardon men cautioned or convicted under prior legislation that outlawed homosexual acts. Occasionally invoked, the law applies in England and Wales. [xv]  In this, his name lives on.

[i] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tortured%20genius

[ii] Published by Simon and Schuster in 1983.also see his lecture of 2018 on Turing, http://www.kings.cam.ac.uk/events/members-friends/turing-lecture-2019

[iii] London, Vintage, 2017

[iv] Quoted by Andrew Hodges, op cit, page 26

[v] Ibid, page 61

[vi] That led to all sorts of ingenious ways to do that!

[vii] This was dramatically demonstrated when Goggle’s AlphaGo (formerly known as DeepMind) defeated world Go champion Ke Jie https://www.theneweconomy.com/technology/alphago-defeats-world-go-champion-ke-jie

[viii] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-17771962

[ix] Hodges op cit, page 208

[x] http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Extras/Turing_running.html

[xi] James Murray, How the leopard gets its spots, Scientific American, vol 258, number 3, p. 80, March 1988

[xii] Vogel, G. (2012). “Turing Pattern Fingered for Digit Formation”. Science. 338 (6113): 1406.

[xiii] Hodges, 2018, op cit, who has uncovered considerable evidence to support this view.

[xiv] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/10536246/Alan-Turing-granted-Royal-pardon-by-the-Queen.html

[xv] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-may-committed-to-introducing-alan-turing-law-and-pardon-gay-men-convicted-of-outdated-crimes-a7320851.html

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