The Turing Solution, a BBC Radio 4 documentary presented by Matt Parker covering “mathematician and code-breaker Alan Turing, and his role in the invention of the computer”, was broadcast last week and is currently available on BBC iPlayer. A quick (28 min) biography covering various aspects of his life and work (particularly including his mathematics and work in early computing), with a wide range of interesting contributors, this is well worth catching.
You're reading: Posts Tagged: Alan Turing
James Grime: Campaign for the Turing Tenner
James Grime has come out in support of the campaign to put Alan Turing on the £10 note. He explains about this in a new video.
[youtube url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHko_-QKrFY]
Film “The Turing Enigma” online for free
The Turing Enigma, “a dark thriller, commemorating the tragic death of Alan Turing,” is available to view for free online. First, here’s a trailer:
[vimeo 25774798]
Campaign to disregard Turing’s conviction
A report on the MK [Milton Keynes] NEWS website offers support for the campaign of Iain Stewart MP “in his efforts to have Alan Turing’s conviction for homosexuality quashed”.
In a piece for Travels in a Mathematical World I wrote about the Turing pardon and the prospect of a new piece of legislation which, according to John Graham-Cumming, “specifically allows for the disregarding of convictions under the old law that was used against Turing”. The new development in the MK News piece refers to this legislation:
The recently-passed Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 allows a person who has been convicted or received a caution for an offence under sections 12 or 13 of the Sexual Offences Act 1956 to apply to have this ‘disregarded’.
These are the same offences for which Turing was convicted and Mr Stewart wants this disregard to be applied posthumously.
So the focus seems to have moved from a pardon, which the Government refused to do, to having the conviction posthumously disregarded under chapter four of the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 (which, if I’m reading it correctly, seems to allow for the person convicted to apply themselves to have their conviction disregarded).
Source: Add your voice to clear a war hero.
Some Turing-related articles free to read for a short period of time, thanks to T&F
Taylor & Francis have generously made some articles related to Alan Turing from their archives freely available until the end of the year. They’re calling it the Alan Turing Centenary Collection, and it includes two reports written by Turing during the war, a few articles which they claim are “about Alan Turing”, and a 1978 article by 2011 Alan Turing Prize winner Judea Pearl. Grab them now, while you can.
They’re also offering 20% discounts on the books The Computer Science Handbook, The Universal Computer: The Road From Leibniz to Turing, and Bright Boys: The Making of Information Technology if you enter the code 193CM at the checkout.
T&F have made a PDF leaflet with descriptions and links to all the material in the collection. Rather cheekily, the second page of the leaflet contains a list of related articles which you might assume to be part of the collection. In fact, they’re still ambitiously priced at £27 each.
Follow the timeline of Alan Turing’s life
The Science Museum in London have created a Facebook timeline of Alan Turing’s life and events afterwards. It’s an excellent use of the new Timeline feature – you can scroll up and down the timeline from Turing’s birth to the current day, which contains plenty on his codebreaking and work with early computers as well as more mundane things like his schooling and the invention of the very first chess-playing computer program. Appropriately, his tragic death is a small footnote to a fascinating life, just a couple of lines. Scrolling back up towards the present, you can see how Turing’s reputation was restored and commemorated, leading up to 2012, the Alan Turing Year.
Protection of Freedoms Act 2012
One of the reasons given against a pardon for Alan Turing in a November 2011 blog post by John Graham-Cumming (who successfully campaigned for a Turing apology in 2009) was that the Protection of Freedoms bill, if passed, would make a pardon unnecessary. This is because this
specifically allows for the disregarding of convictions under the old law that was used against Turing. Once disregarded the law causes their convictions to be deleted. It’s not quite the same thing as a pardon, but its effect is to lift the burden of a criminal record from these living men.
Now the bill has gained Royal Assent, becoming the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012. A short piece in The Independent calls this “a freedom too late” for Alan Turing. The Turing pardon e-petition now has over 33,000 signatures.
Source: Protection of Freedoms Bill.