The Emergence Of The Computer
By 1942 Alan Turing was the genius loci at
Bletchley Park, famous as 'Prof', shabby, nail-bitten, tie-less, sometimes
halting in speech and awkward of manner, the source of many hilarious anecdotes
about bicycles, gas masks, and the Home Guard; the foe of charlatans and
status-seekers, relentless in long shift work with his colleagues, mostly of
student age. To one of these, Joan Clarke, he proposed marriage, and was gladly
accepted. But then he retracted, telling her of his homosexuality.
Turing crossed the Atlantic in November 1942, for
highest-level liaison not only on the desperate U-boat Enigma crisis, but on the
electronic encipherment of speech signals between Roosevelt and Churchill.
Before his return in March 1943, logical weaknesses in the changed U-boat system
had been brilliantly detected, and U-boat Enigma decryption was effectively
restored for the rest of the war. With the battle of the Atlantic regained for
the Allies, crisis resolved, chess champion C. H. O'D. Alexander, hitherto
Turing's deputy, took charge of Hut 8.
Turing became an all-purpose consultant to the by now
vast Bletchley Park operation. As such he saw the 'Fish' material cracked by the
Colossus machines, brought into operation just before D-Day, demonstrating the
feasibility of large-scale digital electronic technology. Turing himself devoted
much time to learning electronics: ostensibly for creating his own, elegant
speech secrecy system, which he effected with the aid of one assistant, Donald
Bayley, at nearby Hanslope Park. But he had another and more ambitious end in
view: in the last stage of the war (for his part in which he was awarded an OBE)
he planned the embodiment of the Universal Turing Machine in electronic form, or
in effect, invented the digital computer.
In 1944, at the invasion of Normandy that Allied
control of the Atlantic allowed, Alan Turing was almost uniquely in possession
of three key ideas:
his own 1936 concept of the universal machine
| the potential speed and reliability of electronic
technology
| the inefficiency in designing different machines for
different logical processes. | |
Turing was captivated by the potential of the computer he had conceived. Although his 1936 work had shown the absolute limitations of the computable, he had become fascinated by what Turing machines could do, rather than by what they could not. He had long abandoned his youthful expectations of finding free will or free spirits through quantum mechanics. His later thought was strongly determinist and atheistic in character. And by the end of the Second World War he had turned against the tentative idea that there were steps of 'intuition' in human thought corresponding to uncomputable operations. Instead, he held that the computer would offer unlimited scope for practical progress towards embodying intelligence in an artificial form.
For the second time, he experienced being pre-empted by a parallel American publication, in this case the EDVAC plan for an electronic computer, with Von Neumann's name attached. Nonetheless, this publication when it appeared in June 1945 worked in practice to Turing's advantage, American competition stimulating the National Physical Laboratory to plan a rival project, to which he was appointed a Senior Principal Scientific Officer. Turing despised his nominal superior J. Womersley, but at least initially this applied mathematician showed a rapid appreciation of the scope of Turing's ideas, and with a eye for acronyms steered Turing's design towards formal approval in early 1946 as the Automatic Computing Engine, or ACE.
Information taken from : http://www.turing.org.uk/bio/part3.html