Codebreaker Page #2

they would succeed and obtain scholarships

and go on to study together at Cambridge.

It wasn't known, of course,

it couldn't be known

to Alan or to Chris

that shortly afterwards,

Alan was to lose his best friend.

Chris died on the 13th of February 1930.

One friend put it quite accurately

when they said, 'poor old Turing

was absolutely bowled over'.

Chris had contracted

tuberculosis as a child.

He suffered from poor health

all his life but he never complained.

He was very private that way.

When I heard he was dead

the world threatened

suddenly to be so different.

I found ways of dragging him around

with me to ease the transition.

I wrote to his mother

a number of times.

I made no secret of

the power of my feelings.

I told her I absolutely worshipped

the ground on which he walked

and she, being his mother,

found no reason to quibble with this.

We shared in the loss of him.

I asked her for a snapshot

and she gave me one.

I have it here.

See?

This is a letter from Alan to

my grandmother, Chris's mother

dated the 20th of February 1930.

He said, 'During the last year

I worked with him continually

and I'm sure that I could not have found

anywhere another companion so brilliant

and yet so charming and unconceited.

[Turing's voice] '/ regarded my interest in

my Work as something to be shared With him

and I think he felt a little

the same about me.

I know that I must put as much energy

into my Work as if he were alive

because that is what

he would like me to do.

Yours sincerely, Alan Turing.'

My mother was very

worried at the time

because I insisted that

Morcom was still with me

working with me, helping me.

He was my companion

and in some ways he was an even

steadier companion after his death.

I didn't want to frighten anyone,

but I knew he was still there.

After Chris's death,

Alan was determined to go to Cambridge

and in fact Alan did end up

with a scholarship to King's College.

Turing felt that there was unfinished work

which Chris had started

and which he wanted to continue.

It was while he was at Cambridge that

he wrote what would prove to be

I think, one of the...

seminal papers in mathematics

of the 20th century.

I don't think anyone, Turing included

was remotely aware of the significance

that this paper was going to have.

It introduces the idea of the computer.

Well, in my mind,

the reason Alan Turing is

well, one of the greatest

scientists of the 20th century

is this paper.

All our modern computers,

from laptops to video games

are exactly what he

laid out in this paper.

When Turing did his early work on computers

the word 'computer' didn't mean

a machine, as it does now.

It meant a person.

It meant a person who calculates,

who computes.

Hundreds and hundreds of young women

with mechanical calculating machines in a room.

And they would do little bits of calculation

and write the answers down on cards

and pass them along

to the next person in line.

And so Turing is clearly starting to think

'can we automate the whole thing?'

And the answer he comes up with is 'yes!'

He was working on a mathematics problem.

Almost incidentally to

a solution of that problem

he did a construction that

he called the universal machine.

And what that construction did

was just change the way people

thought about computation

in a very fundamental way.

Turing's Universal Machine

was purely hypothetical

but it laid out the fundamental principle

underpinning all computers -

that any conceivable mathematical calculation

can be done by a single device

shuffling ones and zeros back and forth.

This is a model of his theoretical machine

from this maths problem.

And the way this works is, he said,

you'll have some kind of processing head

which is basically what

the machine actually is.

It would be looking at a tape.

And so we've got here

a tape with symbols on it.

And the machine would have instructions.

So as it reads different symbols,

it can move the tape forward

it can wind it back.

And it could generally process

the information on the tape

And part of Alan Turing's

genius was to realise

that a machine like this can

compute absolutely anything

because anything can be

written as ones and zeros.

And this is the basis of all computers.

And the introduction of the universal machine

made up of apparently

absurdly simple components

a strip of paper, a pencil

a wheel to move the paper left and right

a set of very simple instructions.

These apparently trivial devices turn out

to have the most profound implications.

I've got here a generic smart phone.

And if you crack this open,

inside it in the centre here is the processor.

So this chip here does exactly what

Alan Turing described this machine doing.

And on the back of this I have

the memory, which is the tape.

And again it's exactly

what Alan Turing described.

A single machine that can be

programmed to do virtually anything.

In the coming years, it would be seen as

a moment of discovery, like Newton's apple.

The digital age had begun.

People credit Turing with

the invention of the computer

because he invented the concept

on which everything else was built.

[Archive footage narrator]

'In the electronics age

the development of giant computers,

electronic brains, has been a key development...'

He writes something that is so original

that you can't categorise it into any of the normal

mathematical categories that are around.

He started something genuinely new.

When you look back

at something like computers

there's often a seed that

everything came from.

Alan Turing was sort of at the top

of everything that ever developed

all the future research that was done

by people building real equipment

that can clink, clink, clink - compute!

One day ladies will be walking their

computers in the park and saying

'do you know, my little computer said

a very funny thing to me this morning'.

We have universal Turing machines

in hardware in our homes

and we use them for dozens

and dozens of different tasks.

Very few parts of our modern life

aren't impacted by Turing's ideas.

The things that he contributed

to computer science

weren't the things that just happened

to be true in one particular year

or in one particular decade.

They're the things that

are fundamentally true.

So they're always goings to be with us

in the same way that the things Galileo

and Newton contributed to physics

are always going to be with us.

All our modern computing

grew from this one idea of Alan Turing's.

Incredible.

But that would be the future.

Back in 1939, Turing's brilliant visions

were interrupted by the shock of war.

In 1939, with the advent

of the Second World War

Turing was recruited to be part of a team

who were involved in the effort

to break German codes.

The centre of operations for this

code-breaking effort was Bletchley Park

which was a country estate,

equidistant from Cambridge and Oxford.

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