Monday, 16 June 2025

23 June: Alan Turing

Born on this date in 1912 was Alan Turing, famous WW2 code breaker and computer pioneer. 10 things you might not know about him:

  1. He was born in Maida Vale in London. Although his father worked for the Civil Service in India, his mother wanted her children to grow up in England. They still travelled to India but left Alan and his brother with a retired army couple in St Leonards on Sea while they were away. They also had a house in Guildford where Alan lived during school holidays.

  2. While his junior school headmistress recognised his talent, saying that she "...had clever boys and hard-working boys, but Alan is a genius," his secondary school teachers weren’t so sure. His English teacher wrote: “I can forgive his writing, though it is the worst I have ever seen, and I try to view tolerantly his unswerving inexactitude and slipshod, dirty, work, inconsistent though such inexactitude is in a utilitarian; but I cannot forgive the stupidity of his attitude towards sane discussion on the New Testament.” Fact was, science and maths weren’t seen as so important in those days. Classics was the subject kids were expected to do well at. That said, Turing’s science and maths grades weren’t so great either. He was nearly stopped from taking the national School Certificate exams on the subject, for fear he would fail.

  3. Nevertheless, science was where his interest lay. There’s a drawing of him as a child, apparently watching daisies grow while the other kids played hockey. He eventually won a scholarship to Cambridge and graduated with a first class honour degree in mathematics.

  4. While he may have preferred observing Flowers to playing hockey, that didn’t mean he didn’t keep himself fit. He was a keen cyclist and runner. When a train strike meant he couldn’t travel by train to his first day at boarding school, he cycled there, 60 miles, all by himself with an overnight stay at an inn, at the age of 13. He’d also run to work and to meetings, sometimes distances of over 30 miles. He even tried out for the Olympic Games in 1948, finishing a marathon in 2 hours 46 minutes 3 seconds, which was only 11 minutes slower than the person who won the gold medal that year. The only reason he wasn’t an Olympic athlete was because he suffered a leg injury which stopped him from taking part. He ran for the Walton Athletic Club and served as its vice president.

  5. Turing began working at Bletchley Park, Britain’s secret headquarters for its codebreakers during World War II, in 1939. It has been said that his work there may have cut the war short by up to two years. He’s credited with saving millions of lives. Even so, at first, he was so frustrated by the lack of resources and staff there that he got together with some others and wrote a personal letter to Winston Churchill, making the case for better funding. In response, Churchill immediately wrote a memo to his chief of staff: “Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this had been done.” Turing’s greatest achievement at Bletchley was cracking the Enigma, a mechanical device used by the Germans to encode messages. It was nearly impossible to decrypt without the correct cipher, which the Germans changed every day. Turing and his team managed to decode the German Enigma messages, helping Allied ships avoid German Submarine attacks.

  6. It’s well known that Turing was gay, at a time when being gay was a crime in the UK. His first love was probably a fellow pupil at school called Christopher Collan Morcom, who died in February 1930, from complications of bovine tuberculosis, contracted after drinking infected cow's milk some years previously. Turing coped with his grief by working that much harder on the topics of science and mathematics that he had shared with Morcom, as a tribute to him. Nevertheless, Turing was briefly engaged to be married to a woman, Joan Clarke, a fellow mathematician and cryptanalyst at Bletchley, in 1941. She wasn’t at all bothered when he told her he was gay. It was Turing who ended it, as he didn’t think he could go through with the marriage. He was arrested for being gay in 1951 and was given the choice of jail time or chemical castration. He chose the latter. His conviction cost him his job (in 1951, it seems, being gay meant you couldn’t keep secrets and were a security risk) and his freedom to travel to other countries. In 2009, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a public apology to Turing on behalf of the British government. “Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly,” Brown said. “on behalf of the British government, we're sorry, you deserved so much better." His conviction was actually pardoned in 2013, when he received a rare royal pardon from the Queen Elizabeth II. Today, he appears on the £50 note, released on 23 June 2021 to coincide with his birthday. He is the first openly gay person to appear on a banknote.

  7. Turing is known as a pioneer in computer science. Even before Bletchley, he’d published a paper called On Computable Numbers, in 1936. In it, he predicted that one day there would be machines able to solve any problem just using 1s and 0s. Later on, in 1945 he invented the Automatic Computing Machine, the first digital computer with stored memory. This wasn’t his only interest. He was also a pioneer in biology. In 1952 he published work on morphogenesis, which became a completely new field of mathematical biology. It was a mathematical explanation of how things grow. His work on the subject has been cited more than 8,000 times. And the plants he studied to come up with all this? Daisies.

  8. The people he worked with saw him as a bit of an eccentric. He was known to his colleagues as "Prof" and his treatise on Enigma was known as the "Prof's Book". He would chain his mug to a radiator to stop his colleagues using it. He’d wear a gas mask when cycling to keep his allergies under control. He never fixed his Bicycle chain, but rather learned to predict when it was going to fall off so he could stop riding and put it back on. In the 1940s, he feared that, in the event of a German invasion, he would lose his life savings. So, he bought two Silver bars worth £250 (£8,000 adjusted for inflation in 2022) and buried them in a wood near Bletchley Park. He wrote a code describing where he had hidden them. However, when he went back to dig the bars up, he couldn’t break his own code and never found his silver bars.

  9. There are a lot of things named after him. There’s the Turing Test, to assess the ability of a computer to imitate a human. We have him to thank for those irritating hoops we have to jump through online to prove we’re not robots: CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. There’s Turing’s Law, which provided amnesty for gay men convicted of indecency. There are numerous university buildings and academic lectures and prizes. There’s Turochamp, a computer Chess progamme that he devised. There’s a Monopoly edition based on his life.

  10. His death at the age of 41 is still a mystery. He was found dead in bed by his maid with a half eaten Apple on the bedside table. The cause of death was cyanide poisoning and the official story was that he injected the apple with the deadly poison and then ate it. Or did he? The evidence that he purposely ended his life by eating a poisoned apple: he’d been convicted of being gay and had lost his job; the medication he was made to take made him impotent and made him grow breasts; he was no longer allowed to travel; he’d been observed to be fascinated by the scene in Snow White when the Wicked Queen poisons an apple to give to Snow White; he’d been plunged into a deep depression by a fortune teller’s prediction (believe it or not, he actually believed in fortune telling, and a few weeks before he died, he’d visited one during a seaside day out. People with him noticed that his sunny mood vanished after he came out of the fortune teller’s tent). On the other hand: Nobody actually thought to test the apple for cyanide; he had shown no signs of putting his affairs in order and there was a to do list by his bed; friends had observed that he seemed to be taking the effects of his medication “in good humour”; even if the apple had been laced with cyanide, it could have been a tragic accident. His mother believed he’d eaten the poisoned apple by accident while experimenting with chemicals at home. Turing was known for being somewhat lax about lab safety and for testing chemicals by tasting them. Others theorised that he was murdered by the FBI because he was party to some secret information that would damage the US. Yet another theory was that Turing did commit suicide and the to do list was a bluff to spare his mother the pain of knowing he’d taken his own life. Finally, it’s sometimes said that the Apple logo, an apple with a bite out of it, is a tribute to the way Alan Turing died. Apple denies that there is any truth in this, and when asked about it, Steve Jobs replied that it wasn’t true, but he wished it was.


Beta

(Combat Team Series #2)


Steff was abducted by an evil alien race, the Orbs, at fourteen. Used as a weapon for years, he eventually escapes, but his problems are just beginning. How does a man support himself when his only work experience is a paper round and using an Orb bio-integrated gun?

Warlord is an alien soldier who knows little but war. When the centuries-old conflict which ravaged his planet ends, he seeks out another world where his skills are still relevant. There are always wars on Earth, it seems. However, none of Earth's powerful armies want him.

Natalie has always wanted to visit England and sees a chance to do so while using her martial arts skills, but there are sacrifices she must make in order to fulfil her dream. 

Maggie resorted to crime to fund her sister's medical care. She uses her genetic variant abilities to gain access to the rooms of wealthy hotel guests. The Ballards look like rich pickings, but they are not what they seem. When Maggie targets them, little does she know that she is walking into a trap.

Hotel owner Hamilton Lonsdale puts together a combat team to pit against those of other multi-millionaires. He recruits Warlord, Natalie, Maggie and Steff along with a trained gorilla, a probability-altering alien, a stockbroker whose work of art proved to be much more than he'd bargained for, a marketing officer who can create psionic forcefields, a teleporting member of the landed gentry, and a socially awkward fixer. This is Combat Team Beta.

Steff never talks about his time with the Orbs, until he finds a woman who lived through it, too. Steff believes he has finally found happiness, but it is destined to be short-lived. He is left with an unusual legacy which he and Team Beta struggle to comprehend; including why something out there seems determined to destroy it.


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