Codebreaker Page #4

He just took a large number of

messages which were intercepted

and he sat down and played around

with these, pencil and paper

and he worked it out.

Suddenly, we could begin

to break the messages

from the German high command

to U-boats in the North Atlantic

and that was absolutely vital.

We certainly couldn't have gone ahead

with D-Day when we did

if we hadn't cracked naval Enigma.

This ability to crack the code and thereby

read the German military traffic

helped the allies strategically so much.

Alan Turing's contribution

cannot be overstated.

I think that Turing's own personal contribution

towards winning the war was crucial.

At the end of the war

we all left Bletchley without

being allowed, as it were

to say anything about

what we'd been doing

which I think was a very great mistake.

I think we could've said more.

Turing's contribution was virtually

unknown during his lifetime.

And in fact, it took quite a few years after

his death before it eventually emerged.

Somehow the step of recognising and

acknowledging and thanking him was skipped.

He was treated abysmally

by his own government.

By the time the war had ended,

a new age had already begun.

The computer age.

And Alan Turing was at the heart of it.

In 1945, he designed one of

the world 's first computers.

The theoretical ideas he'd laid out

in his 1936 paper had become reality.

[Archive footage narrator]

'Manchester University

where anyone who

urgently wishes to know

Whether 2 to power of 127 minus 1

is a prime number or not

can be given the answer

by an electronic brain in 25 minutes

instead of by a human brain in 6 months...'

in 1948, Turing joined the mathematics

department at Manchester University

to work in a new computer lab.

Computers had only just been invented.

The prototype computer

was built here in Manchester

and it ran its first program in June 1948.

It was early years in the era

of using computers.

[Archive footage narrator] 'The brain at

present is only in the experimental stage.

The answer being read

from a cathode ray tube.'

Though by our standards

these computers are primitive

they sparked an extraordinary

idea in Turing's mind.

After a while, he started to wonder,

could a computer ever be truly intelligent?

Can machines really think?

Even the scientists argue that one.

He's obviously realised the

potential power of these machines.

He can see where they're going and

he's tackling a basic philosophical question.

Can a machine think?

Why can't something

of a person remain alive?

I'm not mad.

I don't believe an individual consciousness

could be transplanted into a machine now

though given a few years, who knows?

But for now I only ask

can we not house something like a human

consciousness inside an inorganic vessel

something permanent,

so it will remain and learn

and achieve something like wisdom,

a wisdom to which you and I can refer?

Would it ease your grief

over Christopher Morcom?

The creation of this machine of yours.

No, no, yes, but not in the way you think.

Not because I myself could vindicate Chris's

mortality by creating another intelligence.

It wouldn't be Chris after all, so how

could it possibly provide any relief?

No.

But because it would show Chris

his living hadn't been in vain.

That he would have inspired me

to create something

an intelligence, not his,

but in his name.

Something that would never die.

There's no question

but that Alan Turing

was the real father of AI

of Artificial Intelligence.

He was already making the argument that

there could be such a thing as a thinking machine

an intelligent machine.

Towards the end of 1950, Alan Turing

published a remarkable essay.

And in this essay, Alan Turing

argued that it was possible

to work out whether

machines possess intelligence.

Turing's basic idea is that if you're

trying to decide whether something is intelligent

it doesn't matter what's going on inside,

all that matters is the output.

His idea was that computers,

if they can pretend to be intelligent

then we may as well

consider them intelligent.

He realises there's a whole world of

philosophical debates and arguments

about what is and isn't consciousness.

Frankly, he said

if computer can convince you

it's acting intelligently, who's to say it's not?

Turing proposed something

he called the Imitation Game.

He imagines a machine

and a human and a judge.

If a machine can convince

the judge that it's a human

the machine should be

judged to be intelligent.

That's the Turing Test.

Turing is one of the great

original thinkers of the 20th century.

He seemed to be able to see further.

You get a feeling when you read his work

that his mind is way out in front.

Until now Turing's work had been secret,

or comprehensible only to mathematicians.

But his ideas on artificial intelligence

caught the public imagination.

He was now being quoted

in the national press.

[Turing's voice]

' This is only a fore taste of what is to come

and only the shadow of what is to be

but I do not see why it should not

enter any one of the fields

normally covered by the human intellect

and eventually compete on equal terms.

I do not think you can even

draw the line at sonnets

though the comparison

is perhaps a little bit unfair

because a sonnet written by a machine

would be better appreciated by another machine.

Turing was attempting to

demystify the idea

that human beings have a sort of

exclusive ability to experience emotion

to experience pleasure,

to experience pain.

Very, very controversial thing to say

because it was in effect taking mankind off

the pedestal that mankind had put itself on.

The idea that robots and computers

challenge us with

is their ability to imitate what we do

and therefore it becomes more and more

difficult to tell the difference.

What Turing's argument did was

to give computer designers ambition

and everyone else a sense of the scope

and scale of what might well happen.

Because, what he understood from his

wartime work and his work in the later 1940s

was that it would be possible to make

systems of machines of unimaginable scale.

They would develop,

they would have experience

they would have careers and in a

very interesting way they would have lives.

And that mixture of ambition and clarity, I think,

is one of Turing's greatest legacies to modernity.

Turing's ideas on artificial intelligence

established him as a visionary scientist

but there was more to his life.

By the 1950s, Alan was in one sense

an ivory tower intellectual

but in another sense he, you know,

he lived, occasionally at least, on the streets.

In many parts of Manchester,

there were cruising areas for gay men

where people could meet other men

from all classes and situations.

For someone like Alan,

entering the gay scene, the queer world

must have been intensely thrilling.

Surrounding all this of course

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