Alan Turing, the father of the computer turns 100

Marks the centenary of Turing, the visionary of the era of computers and artificial intelligence hacking Enigma

Alan Mathison Turing meet today 100 years of not having died under mysterious circumstances in 1954, but who was Turing? Turing was a British mathematician and philosopher who is considered by many to be one of the fathers of modern computing. And is that the current computer ... owes much to developments Turing. Among them are these three.

The Turing machine. Create a computer when there were no less transistors and chips could be considered impossible, however, Turing designed the foundations for a programmable machine capable of solving simple operations. Basically, the proposed system was able to read information properly formatted outside, perform an operation on it and give out information according to the operation performed. For the development of this device also had to lay the foundations for a new concept, algorithms that later would lead to the first programming languages.

Bombe against Enigma. Surely many sounds you Enigma cipher machine used by the Nazis during World War II. As the brain that developed the first machine (arguably an electromechanical computer) capable of decrypting Enigma messages was generated by Turing. The British defense ministry met at Bletchley Park to a group of experts to break the Enigma encryption. Although they were a team, it was Turing who devised the operation of Bombe, the machine that was translating German secret messages. It was arguably one of the first hackers and laid the basis of computer models with which a few years later would start to create computers based on vacuum tubes. In some of these primitive computers such as Colossus Mark I, which occupied an entire room, participated actively.

The Turing test. Its most philosophical led him to create the concept of artificial intelligence and possible consequences. The research focused on achieving distinguish the critical moment in which a machine / computer lograse match or exceed human reasoning. This developed the test that bears his name, which is basically to test the cognitive intelligence. Turing postulated that when a computer can hold a conversation and his answers can not be distinguished from those of a human being, then you have passed the test.

Despite these achievements, Alan Turing was a victim of society in which he lived and was ostracized when he acknowledged his homosexuality. His health deteriorated rapidly as a result of this situation and in 1954 died from eating a contaminated apple with cyanide. The conspiracy theories about this have been many and it has been speculated a possible murder, suicide or accidental contamination of laboratory products. Even some say that the apple of a famous brand of electronic devices (see here) is a tribute to the brilliant subliminal Turing. Today Google Doodle dedicated his day.

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