Alan Turing's story could be rebooted by calls to pardon late computer legend

Alan Turing’s story could be
rebooted by calls to pardon late
computer legend

      View Photo Gallery — Alan Turing and his legacy:  Mathematician Alan Turing helped crack Nazi

      codes during World War II and laid the groundwork for the computer.

By Anthony Faiola, Published: Washington Post, September 19 E-mail the writer
BLETCHLEY, England — A founding father of the modern computer, Alan Turing
devised a machine that unraveled the enigma of Nazi codes and aided the defeat of
Adolf Hitler. Convicted of homosexuality after World War II and sentenced to
chemical castration, Turing — an avid fan of the film “Snow White” — was found
dead in 1954 from cyanide poisoning, a bitten apple by his bedside.

More than half a century after his apparent suicide and following global strides in
gay rights, a movement is cresting to reboot the record of the British
mathematician’s short but luminous life.

(Science Museum, London/SSPL) - Portrait of Alan Turing.
Responding to a campaign by laureates such as Cambridge physicist Stephen
Hawking, the British Parliament is moving toward granting Turing a posthumous
pardon. The act would recognize the humiliation of one of computer science’s leading
intellects who, after being sentenced by a British court to forced treatment with
female hormones, became impotent and budded breasts before being found dead by
his housekeeper in a lonely room near Manchester. Some academics are even calling
for a reopening of the inquest that quickly declared his death self-inflicted, despite
the lack of a suicide note.

The push comes amid a new swell of international attention for a man who scholars
say made conceptual breakthroughs that laid the groundwork for everything from
mainframes to iPhones. The recent rush of tributes include new books on his life,
Turing-inspired computer conventions and the rediscovery of his lesser-known
works exploring topics such as linguistic philosophy and the search for mathematical
proof of the human soul. The fresh accolades are propelling a wronged war hero,
scholars say, to his rightful place in history.

“Every time you turn on your computer, every time you check your e-mail, every time
you share a photo,” it is because of Turing’s concepts, said Teddy Schwarzman,
producer of the “Imitation Game,” a multimillion-dollar biopic on Turing due out
next year starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley.

Yet the campaign to pardon Turing’s 1952 conviction — which came after he
acknowledged having a same-sex relationship and declared he saw nothing wrong
with it — is also igniting a debate over the tricky business of rewriting history.

Opponents argue that what’s done is done and that a pardon could spark an
avalanche of petitions from families of other deceased convicts whose punishments
in their day now seem barbaric. Still others say the parliamentary proposal does not
go far enough. If Turing is pardoned, why not the writer Oscar Wilde, the actor John
Gielgud and the thousands of other less-notable Britons once punished for the love
that dare not speak its name?

Since last year, living Britons convicted under the 1885 law that largely targeted gay
men — popular myth says Queen Victoria did not believe lesbians existed — can
apply for pardons. But Parliament has yet to extend the same right to families
wishing to clear the names of dead relatives who were sentenced under the law —
which was overturned in 1967 in England and Wales and 1980 in Scotland.

“The argument [for pardoning Turing alone] is seductive,” Ben Summerskill, chief
executive of gay rights group Stonewall, recently wrote in the Guardian newspaper.
“This brilliant man helped crack Hitler’s Enigma codes, thus shortening the Second
World War by up to two years. Hundreds of thousands of lives were probably saved
as a consequence.”

But what good would it do, Summerskill argued, if Parliament does not also back
pardons for other deceased gay men, including British soldiers who returned from
World War II “to a nation where simply having a loving private life led almost
automatically to prison.”

If the move to pardon Turing shows anything, however, it is that one of the most
compelling figures in the rarefied world of mathematics has perhaps never been
more popular.

Pioneering concepts

Turing’s reputation proceeded him in academic circles, even after the scandal of his
conviction and subsequent death at age 41. But it was only in the 1960s and the
dawning of the information age in the 1970s that scholars began to truly grasp the
importance of his earlier work.

His seminal 1936 paper “On Computable Numbers” outlined the theory of a
“Universal Machine,” a device that some scholars now call the conceptual forerunner
of program-based computers. In the 1940s, he outlined what was arguably the first
realizable design for a modern computer. In 1950, he propagated an early notion of
artificial intelligence in a paper that posed the question: “Can machines think?”

Yet Turing remained relatively obscure in the public eye until the late 1970s, when
the first details emerged about his role in the top-secret “code breakers” operation at
Bletchley Park — a sprawling estate that became a World War II museum here in
England’s picturesque county of Buckinghamshire.

Teams of mathematicians, linguists and engineers first descended on the warrenlike
complexes in 1939. As Hitler’s blitz began raining fire on British cities a year later,
Turing and others worked round the clock to turn the tide of the war by cracking
Nazi messages encoded by the infamous Enigma machines. Even among the great
minds gathered at Bletchley Park for the war effort, scholars say, Turing stood out.

Turing had already distinguished himself as a leading mathematician — a brilliant, if
socially awkward man who practiced his speeches on a teddy bear named Porgy and
had a penchant for intellectual banter. Building on earlier work done by Polish

experts and in collaboration with a team that included fellow mathematician Gordon
Welchman, Turing and company delivered the war’s other big “bombe” — the bombe
machine.

About the size of an upright queen-size bed, the bombe allowed for quick deciphering
of Nazi messages, helping secure a key victory against German U-boats that were
strangling supply lines in the Atlantic.

“As one of his colleagues once said, it was a very good thing that the government
didn’t know that Turing was a homosexual during the war, because if they found out,
they would have sacked him and we would have lost,” said Lord John Sharkey,
sponsor of the Turing pardon in Britain’s upper house.

In the 1980s, an exhaustive biography by Oxford scholar Andrew Hodges elevated
Turing’s image further, and a play about Turing’s life hit London’s West End in 1986.
But more recently, Turing has risen to folk-hero status, particularly on university
campuses and at underground hacker conferences in Europe.

A controversial end

In 2009, then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown offered the first national apology to
Turing. It set up the centennial of Turing’s birth last year, when universities from the
United States to Peru to New Zealand held events honoring Turing. The first major
retrospective on Turing’s life was extended through next month because of high
demand at London’s Science Museum. A British postage stamp bearing his likeness
went on sale last year, as did an Alan Turing edition of Monopoly — a board game he
was said to be obsessed with as a child. Google has unveiled a “doodle” in his honor.

Led by Jack Copeland, director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing at
New Zealand’s University of Canterbury, some scholars say the time is ripe to reopen
the inquest into Turing’s death.

Copeland argues that evidence suggests Turing bore the burden of his sentence with
a sense of humor and a strong will. He theorizes that fumes from an experiment may
have accidentally killed Turing. Although two jars of cyanide were found in Turing’s

home, the apple found by his bedside — long assumed to have been dipped in poison
— was never tested.

Hodges paints Turing’s death as intentional, albeit sudden and deeply symbolic. The
apple — whether prop or poisoned — nodded to “Snow White,” a film that had left a
deep impression on Turing, while also suggesting the “forbidden fruit” that had
branded him a criminal. Still, Turing gave little sign that he was preparing to take his
own life, and at the time of the 1954 inquest, his mother insisted his death must have
been accidental.

Today, however, some members of the Turing family are arguing against a new
inquest. The body of evidence, they say, still overwhelmingly supports suicide.

“I think it’s much less awkward territory to focus on the achievements of his life and
not the Shakespearean and rather unpleasant end to things,” said his nephew,
Dermot Turing. “He would rather have had his legacy be about that.”

Karla Adam in London contributed to this report.