Alan Mathison Turing, alias: Turing, Alan Turing, the father of artificial intelligence, was born on June 23, 1912, 1954 Died on June 7. His representative works include: "On the Application of Numerical Computing in Decision-Making Problems" and "Can Machines Think?" 》.

He is a British mathematician and logician, known as the father of computer science and the father of artificial intelligence.

In 1931, Turing entered King's College, Cambridge University. After graduation, he went to Princeton University in the United States to study for a doctorate. After the outbreak of World War II, he returned to Cambridge and later assisted the military in cracking Germany's famous encryption system Enigma. , helped the Allies win World War II.

In 1952, the British government convicted Turing of homosexuality, and Turing subsequently underwent chemical castration (estrogen injection). On June 7, 1954, Turing died of poisoning after eating an apple containing cyanide. He was 41 years old. On December 24, 2013, at the request of British Justice Minister Chris Grayling, Queen Elizabeth II issued a royal pardon to Turing.

Turing made many contributions to the development of artificial intelligence. He proposed a test method for determining whether a machine is intelligent, the Turing test. To this day, there are test competitions every year. In addition, Turing's famous Turing machine model laid the foundation for the way modern computers work logically.

Due to Turing's outstanding contributions to computer science and artificial intelligence, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) established the Turing Award in 1966 to specifically reward individuals who have made important contributions to the computer industry. . Its name is taken from the pioneer of computer science and British scientist Alan M. Turing.

Alan Turing has shown strong creative ability and obsession with mathematics since he was a child.

At the age of 14, Turing was admitted to the famous Sherborne School in London. Under the good secondary education conditions, he showed great interest and acumen in natural sciences. mathematical mind.

When he was 15 years old, in order to help his mother understand Einstein's theory of relativity, he wrote an abstract of one of Einstein's works, which showed that he already had extraordinary mathematical skills and scientific understanding.

Due to Turing's great interest in natural science, he twice won the Natural Science Award established by the parents of one of his classmates (Mocomb) in 1930 and 1931. There was a paper entitled "Reaction of Sulfite and Halide in Acidic Solution", which was appreciated by the inspector sent by the government. His interest in natural science laid the foundation for some of his later research. His mathematical ability allowed him to When he was in high school, he won the King Edward VI Golden Shield in Mathematics.

So in 1931, Turing was admitted to King's College, Cambridge University, and received a mathematics scholarship due to his excellent performance. At Cambridge, his mathematical abilities were fully developed.

In 1935, his first mathematical paper "The Equivalence of Left and Right Nearly Periodicities" was published in the "Journal of the London Mathematical Society". In the same year, he also wrote the article "On the Gaussian Error Function". This paper enabled him to be directly elected as a researcher of King's College from a college student. He won the famous British Smith Prize in Mathematics the following year and became one of the prestigious graduates of King's College.

In May 1936, Turing submitted a paper to London's authoritative mathematics magazine titled "On the Application of Numerical Computation in Decision-Making Problems." After this article was published in the 42nd issue of the "Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society" in 1937, it immediately attracted widespread attention. In the appendix of the paper, he described a machine that could assist mathematical research, which was later called a "Turing machine." The most revolutionary aspect of this idea was that it was the first time that it was used in purely mathematical symbolic logic and the physical world. A connection was established between them, and the computers we later knew as well as the "artificial intelligence" that has not yet been realized are all based on this idea. This was the first important paper in his life and his most famous work.

In 1937, Turing published another article "Computability and λ Definability" which expanded the "Church thesis" proposed by Church to form "Church- Turing's Thesis", the rigor of computing theory, has foundational significance for the formation and development of computer science.

In September 1936, Turing was invited to study at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, USA, and worked with Church.

While in the United States, he did some research on group theory and wrote a doctoral thesis. He received his doctorate from Princeton in 1938. His thesis was titled "Logic System Based on Ordinal Numbers". It was officially published in 1939 and had a profound impact on mathematical logic research.

In the summer of 1938, Turing returned to the UK and was still working as a researcher at King's College, Cambridge University. He continued to study mathematical logic and computing theory, and at the same time began the development of computers.

However, the arrival of World War II interrupted Turing's normal research work. In the autumn of 1939, he was called to the Communications Department of the British Foreign Office to engage in military work, mainly deciphering enemy codes. Work. Due to the need for deciphering work, he participated in the development of the world's earliest electronic computers. His work was so outstanding that he was awarded the government's highest award, the Order of the British Empire (O.B.E.) in 1945.

In 1945, Turing ended his work in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He tried to resume his pre-war research in theoretical computer science and combine it with his wartime work to develop a new computer. The idea is supported by the authorities. In the same year, Turing was hired as a researcher at the National Institute of Physics in Teddington and began working on the logical design and specific development of the "Automatic Computer" (ACE). This year, Turing wrote a 50-page design specification for ACE. This instruction manual was officially published in 1972 after being kept secret for 27 years. Under the guidance of Turing's design ideas, the ACE prototype was produced in 1950 and the large-scale ACE machine was made in 1958. It is believed that Turing proposed the concept of a universal computer.

From 1945 to 1948, he worked at the British National Physical Laboratory, responsible for the research of automatic computing engines.

In August 1946, Turing participated in his first competition after formal running training. It was a 3-mile (4.8 km) race he participated in after joining Walton Athletics Club. Turing won first place with a time of 15 minutes and 37 seconds, which ranked 20th in the UK that year.

In 1947, at the British Amateur Athletics Association Marathon Championships at Loughborough University Stadium in Leicestershire, Turing ran his personal best in the marathon of 2 hours and 46 Minutes and 03 seconds, ranked fifth in that race.

In 1948, Turing accepted the position of senior lecturer at the University of Manchester and was appointed assistant to the person in charge of the Manchester Automatic Digital Computer (Madam) project, specifically leading the mathematical aspects of the project. Summary of work.

In 1949, he became deputy director of the Computer Laboratory of the University of Manchester and was responsible for the software theory development of the earliest real computer-"Manchester No. 1". Therefore, he became the first person in the world to actually use computers. A scientist who studies mathematics.

In 1950, Turing wrote and published "The programmers' handbook for the Manchester electronic computer". During this period, he continued to conduct theoretical research in mathematical logic. And proposed the famous "Turing test". In the same year, he raised the question about machine thinking. His paper "Computing machiery and intelligence" attracted widespread attention and far-reaching influence. In October 1950, Turing published the paper "Can Machines Think?". This An epoch-making work that earned Turing the title of "Father of Artificial Intelligence".

In 1951, due to his achievements in computable numbers, he became a member of the Royal Society at the age of 39. .

In 1952, he resigned as a researcher at King's College, Cambridge University, and concentrated on working at the University of Manchester. In addition to his day job and research work, he supervised a number of PhD students and acted as a consultant to Franti, a company that manufactured automatic digital computers in Manchester.

In 1952, Turing wrote a chess program. However, at that time, no computer had enough computing power to execute this program, so he imitated the computer and took half an hour for each step. He played a game with a colleague and the program lost. Later, a research group at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA, designed the world's first computer program chess on MANIAC based on Turing's theory.