Happy 100th Birthday; Allan Turing

Alan Turing was a mathematician, logician, computer scientist extraordinaire. Today would have been Turing’s 100th birthday.

Turing who along with John von Neumann, conceived the stored-program computer architecture, is considered by many to be the father of computer science and artificial intelligence, who made major advances in mathematical biology and electromechanics, all before the age of 41. He committed suicide, shortly after his 42th birthday, allegedly, by cyanide poisoning. When Turing’s body was discovered, there was a half-eaten apple beside his bed. This was believed to be the method by which he consumed the fatal dosage of cyanide, although the circumstances of his death has been challenged recently,

Although, Turing is probably best known for its formulation of the so-called Turing Test, and its constructive proposals for research in Artificial Intelligence, he was actually a deep thinker on humanity, who made it clear that the human 'intuition' is related to the human act of seeing the truth of a formally unprovable Gödel statement.

According to Turing the activities of an intelligent mind must be a computable process. As Roger Penrose wries;

'It seems likely that he [Turing] viewed physical action in general — which would include the action of a human brain — to be always reducible to some kind of Turing-machine action.'

But , according to Gödel's theorem we can see the truth of statements which cannot be proved by the application of a formal system of rules. Thus, Turing concluded that if the activities of an intelligent mind are a computable process, then human mind must be able to perform uncomputable operations so as to be able to see the truth of a formally unprovable Gödel statement.

In his 1938 Princeton Ph.D. thesis, trying to find the consequence of supplementing a formal system with uncomputable deductive steps, Turing introduced the definition of an 'oracle' which can supply on demand the answer to the halting problem for every Turing machine. He gave his subject-matter an interpretation which Newman interpreted it as the mathematician's 'intuition' in theorem-proving.

In 1977, Rob Janoff  who worked for Regis McKenna as an art director and was tasked to design the logo for Apple Computer, creating an apple with a bite out of it. Janoff presented Steve Jobs with several different monochromatic logos, and Jobs immediately took a liking to the bitten apple. While Jobs liked the logo, he insisted it should be in color, as a way to humanize the company. It is suggested that the bitten apple pays homage to Turing.