The story begins with a mystery.
The modern computer in Britain began with the German cipher telegram "mystery", and it was none other than alan turing who solved this mystery. He is a well-known figure in the computer field and a computer genius comparable to Von Neumann in the United States. During his short career, Turing made in-depth research in the fields of quantum mechanics, mathematical logic, biology and chemistry. In his later years, he also started a new discipline-nonlinear mechanics.
Turing died young. In his 42-year life, his creativity is colorful. He is a gifted mathematician and expert in computer theory. At the age of 24, Turing machine theory was put forward; 365,438+0 years old, participated in the development of colossus; At the age of 33, he conceived a simulation system; At the age of 35, he proposed the concept of automatic programming; At the age of 38, he designed the Turing test. All these waves of inspiration shine with his foresight in the history of computer development. Especially after the 1960s. Of course, Turing's highest achievement is in computer and artificial intelligence. He is a pioneer in this field.
Master of the earth. In recognition of his contribution, Turing Awards are awarded to the best computer scientists every year. This medal, like the Nobel Prize, brings supreme honor to the winners in the computer field. Alan turing himself, as the father of artificial intelligence, is more respected and will always occupy a place in the historical picture of the ten-fold change of the computer industry. His amazing talent and early death in the prime of life also painted a mysterious legend on his personal life.
Turing, a genius
Alan turing, 19 12 was born in London, England on June 23rd. His grandfather got an honorary degree in mathematics from Cambridge University, but his father's ability in mathematics is average. Therefore, Turing's family education will not help him much in his future achievements in mathematics and computers. Turing was lively and active when he was a child, and he showed the spirit of exploring science very early. According to his mother's memory, when he was 3 years old, Little Turing made his first experiment, trying to break the arm and calf of a toy Woodenhead and plant it in the garden, waiting for more Woodenhead to grow. At the age of eight, he began to try to write a science book called About Microscope. In this short book, Turing, a gifted child, misspelled many words and had some syntactic problems, but his writing was still understandable, just like that. At the beginning and end of the book, he echoed the same sentence "First of all, you should know that light is straight", but the content in the middle is very short, breaking the record of scientific works. Turing once said, "I always seem to want to make something out of the most common things." Even playing football with children, he can give up being a striker and score goals, and only like patrolling the sideline, because this will give him a chance to calculate the angle at which the ball flies out of bounds. His teacher thinks: "Turing's mind can jump like a kangaroo." Turing is a genius. He began to study Einstein's theory of relativity when he was 16 years old. 193 1 year, Turing was admitted to King's College, Cambridge University, and began his mathematical career, studying quantum mechanics, probability theory and logic. At school, Turing is also the best student in Wittgenstein's class and a master of modern language philosophy. He is interested in mathematical logic founded by Russell and Whitehead of Cambridge University. The emergence of mathematical logic mainly originated from a "wise man" named Epimini on the island of Crete in ancient Greece, who said that "all Cretes lie". We can simplify it to: "What I said is a lie". This leads to a strange circle where both sides can't justify themselves: if he is not lying, then this sentence is wrong, he is lying; If he is really lying, then he is right to say that he is lying, so he is not lying. Russell and Whitehead expelled it from logic, set theory and number theory, and finally tried their best to incorporate it into mathematical principles.
As soon as Turing went to college, he fell in love with mathematical principles. 193 1 year, after the appearance of the famous "Godel Theorem" (which holds that no axiomatic system can deduce all the true propositions in number theory unless there is a paradox in the system itself), Turing, a genius, put forward an idea in Cambridge University, the stronghold of mathematical logic: Can there be such a machine that can solve all the problems one by one in principle through some general mechanical steps? After graduating from college, Turing went to Princeton University to study for a doctorate, and even invented the decoder. There, he met von Neumann, who praised his paper and then put forward the concept of "stored program". Turing returned to his alma mater to teach after finishing his studies. In a short time, Turing published several weighty mathematical papers, which won him a great reputation.
Genius turing
In Cambridge, Turing is a geek, and his every move is often unexpected. He is a bachelor and a long-distance runner. Among his colleagues and students, this famous professor is dressed casually, does not wear a tie, is not good at words, is a little slow and shy, and often bites his nails, but he has won people's respect for his outstanding intelligence. Turing goes to work by bike every day because he suffers from allergic rhinitis. He will have a runny nose and sneeze when he meets pollen. Therefore, he often wears a gas mask on his way to work and marches in the city, which has become a great spectacle in Cambridge. Turing's bicycle often falls off the chain halfway, but he just refuses to go to the garage to repair it. Every time he rides a bike, he always mumbles in his mouth and thinks carefully in his heart. This chain is very strange. It always slips after a certain number of turns. Turing was able to stop the car just before the chain slipped, which made the onlookers admire him and thought Turing was playing acrobatics. Later, Turing actually installed a small mechanical counter next to the bike, stopped at the corner, had a rest, changed his mood, and then began to exercise again.
1936, Turing submitted a paper to the authoritative mathematics magazine in London, entitled "On the application of digital calculation in decision-making problems". In this groundbreaking paper, Turing gave a strict mathematical definition of "computability" and put forward the famous idea of "Turing machine". Turing machine is not a concrete machine, but an ideological model, which can make a very simple but extremely powerful computer device to calculate all imaginable computable functions. The device consists of a controller and a working band (as memory), assuming that both ends are borderless. The workspace is divided into squares of the same size, and each square can be written with a symbol of a given alphabet. The controller can move left and right on the conveyor belt, and it has the function of reading and writing to produce the desired results. Outsiders will be in a fog, and insiders will call it "the pioneering work to clarify the principles of modern computers" and "the ideal computer". This paper talks about an armchair strategist and creates a "Turing machine". But modern general-purpose computers do use corresponding programs to complete any set tasks. This theory laid the theoretical foundation of the whole modern computer. "Turing Machine" is as famous as "Von Neumann Machine" in the history of computer, and will always be included in the history of computer development.
Turing machine theory not only solves the basic theoretical problems of pure mathematics, but also proves the feasibility of developing a general digital computer in theory. Although as early as 100 years ago, 1834, Chuck Babbage (1792 ~ 187 1) designed and manufactured an "analyzer" to illustrate the specific digital calculation, but his failure lies in ". Turing machine theory not only proves the feasibility of developing "universal machine", but also is five years earlier than the first universal program control computer Z-3 made by K Zuze in Germany in 194 1. This has to make people marvel at the far-reaching significance of this theory.
Riddle Turing
Just as Turing's theoretical research was further deepened, the war broke out. He was sent to Breschel Manor for "super secret" research. At that time, brayshay Le Manor was a "government cipher school", which was the wartime British intelligence decoding center. In this quiet Victorian building, birds are singing and flowers are fragrant, and people are inaccessible. In fact, more than 65,438+02,000 volunteers worked here day and night, intercepting, sorting out and deciphering German military intelligence, and some achievements even reached Prime Minister Churchill himself. Turing is called "Professor" here, and no one knows his real name. At that time, there was a communication cipher machine called "Enigma" in Germany, and it was difficult for the decipherers to crack it even if they racked their brains. This question was given to Turing, who led more than 200 elite people to conduct cryptanalysis, including even chess champion Alexander. The analysis and calculation work is very complicated, and 26 letters can replace 8 trillion Enigmas in the Enigma machine. If the wiring is changed, the change will exceed 2.5 trillion. Finally, thanks to a real "mystery" provided by his Polish colleague, Turing designed a deciphering machine with his genius idea. This machine is mainly composed of relays and 80 electron tubes are also used. The password can be read directly by photoelectric reader, which can read 2000 characters per second and make a click sound when running. It was nicknamed "Robinson" by Turing, and so far no one can understand how Turing directed its work. But "Robinson" really worked miracles. Under its tip-off, German planes fell into the trap again and again, and it didn't end well.
From 65438 to 0945, Turing came to the British National Institute of Physics as a senior researcher with the Medal of Honor awarded by the British Empire. Two years later, Turing wrote an internal report and put forward the concept of "automatic program". However, due to the strict and rigid secrecy laws of the British government, this report has never been seen. 1969, Wodinger of the United States published the same result, and Britain quickly revealed the treasure at the bottom of the box, and finally "decrypted" Turing's report in 1970. Turing's report was later included in the collection of machine intelligence papers compiled by Edinburgh University. Thanks to brayshay Le's experience, Turing submitted a design scheme of "automatic computer" and led a group of excellent electronic engineers to start manufacturing a new computer called ACE. It used about 800 pipes and cost about 40 thousand pounds. 1950, the ace computer was born and began to appear in front of the public, playing some "tricks" for interested people and winning bursts of applause. Turing introduced ACE's memory device, saying, "It can easily remember 10 pages of a book." Obviously, ACE was one of the fastest and most powerful electronic computers in the world at that time.
1946, at the initiative of Dr. Newman, the Royal Society established a computer laboratory. Dr Newman, a member of the Royal Society and the decoding team, played a key role in the creation of Hess Robinson. The new laboratory of the Royal Society is located in Manchester University, not London, and is led by Dr Newman. In July 1946, the research fund was in place and Dr. Newman began to recruit candidates. Alan turing also joined the computer lab in September of the following year. For a time, Manchester University will be the best. The laboratory is located in an old Victorian house. The conditions are very simple, but it is also magnificent because of the arrival of Turing. 1June, 948, a small model machine was built here, and everyone likes to call it "baby". This model machine uses cathode ray tubes to solve the storage problem. It can store 32 words, each with a length of 32 bits. This is the model of the first electronic computer that can completely execute stored programs.
Master turing
By 1949+00, all the improvements have been completed, and the automatic control system sandwiched between two layers of memory has been running normally. Under the control of the program, the information interaction between the drum of cathode ray tube and the storage unit can be realized. Turing designed some peripheral devices with input-output cooperative circuits. Turing also got electric typing equipment from the Communication Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs where he worked in wartime through old ties, even including a punched paper tape keyboard collected from the Germans after the war. In this way, the whole model machine is completed. During the whole experimental stage, everyone was very busy. At the end of 1949, the model machine was delivered to a local electronics company named Ferranti in Manchester, and the formal construction began. 195 1 completed in February, commonly known as "Michael 1". It has 4,000 tubes, 72,000 resistors and 2,500 capacitors, and can complete the operations of square root, logarithm and trigonometric functions in 0. 1 second. "Michael 1" has more complete functions than the previous model machine. The storage capacity of electrostatic memory is doubled, eight cathode-ray tubes can store 256 40-bit words, and the capacity of magnetic drum can be expanded to 16384 words, which is really an amazing project.
Frankl, a contemporary of von Neumann, recalled that von Neumann never said that the concept of "stored program" computer was his invention, but he said more than once that Turing was the founder of modern computer design thought. When someone put the title of "father of electronic computer" on von Neumann's head, he said modestly that the real father of computer should be Turing. Of course, von Neumann is well-deserved, and Turing also has the title of "father of artificial intelligence". They are two giant stars that reflect each other in the vast starry sky in computer history.
As early as 1945, Turing put forward the idea of "analog system" and made a detailed report, hoping to build a computer without a fixed instruction system. It can simulate the functions of other computers with different instruction systems, but this report was not published until 1972. This shows that Turing began to explore what was later called "artificial intelligence" after World War II, and he began to pay attention to the relationship between human neural network and computer computing.
1950, Turing came to the University of Manchester to teach, and also served as the head of the university's automatic computer project. This year 10, he published another article entitled "Can machines think? The paper has become an epoch-making work. It is this article that won Turing a laurel-"the father of artificial intelligence". In this paper, Turing first put forward the concept of "machine thinking". He refuted the statement that machines can't think one by one and gave a positive answer. He also defined the problem of intelligence from the perspective of behaviorism, and put forward a hypothesis: that is, a person conducts a series of questions and answers with each other in a special way without touching each other. If he can't judge whether the other person is a person or a computer according to these questions for a long time, then he can think that this computer is as intelligent as others, that is, this computer can think. This is the famous Turing test. There were only a few computers in the world at that time, so it was impossible to pass the test. But Turing predicted that by the end of this century, computers will definitely pass the Turing test. Finally, his prediction was fully realized in IBM's Deep Blue. Of course, Kasparov and Deep Blue are not riddles, but a contest between you and me.
The story ends in mystery.
195 1 year, Turing was elected as a member of the Royal Society for his outstanding contributions. Just as his career was stepping into glory, disaster came. 1952, Turing was arrested by the police for being gay. Like other smart people, Turing is "different" in his personal lifestyle. At that time, people were not as tolerant of homosexuality as they are now, but regarded this behavior as an immoral evil. This story is exposed like this. At that time, a girl named Joan Clark fell in love with Turing, who liked each other very much and proposed to her. Joan accepted it gladly. But before long, Turing chickened out and told Joan that he was gay. 1948, Turing left the then highly confidential National Physical Laboratory (NPL) because of his homosexuality. However, some people say that Turing was "dismissed" by the British military intelligence, and many people are disappointed with the departure of this genius.
1952 On March 3 1 day, Turing was arrested by the police for having an affair with a local youth in Manchester. In court, Turing neither denied nor defended himself. In the solemn court, he solemnly told people that his actions were not wrong and he was found guilty. Between imprisonment and treatment, Turing chose to inject hormones to treat the so-called "sexual perversion". After that, Turing began to study biology and chemistry, and also had a deep relationship with a psychologist. At that time, his temper had become grumpy, and his personality was even more gloomy and eccentric. 1953 In March, he was targeted by the police because he received a Norwegian guest who was noticed by the British police and was even followed when he went to Greece for a holiday.
1June 8, 954, Turing was 42 years old and was at the peak of his most brilliant creation. One morning, the housekeeper walked into his bedroom and found that the desk lamp was still on, and there was an apple on the bedside, which only bit a small part. Turing fell asleep in bed and everything was as usual. But this time, Turing fell asleep forever and won't wake up again ... The forensic autopsy concluded that toxic cyanide killed him and the apple was soaked in cyanide solution. Turing's mother said that he accidentally got it when he was doing a chemical experiment. Her "Allen" has the habit of biting her nails since she was a child. But the outside world said that it was suicide by taking poison, and a generation of geniuses finished their lives like this.