Pardon and Modern AI Legacy

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Alan Turing is one of the most celebrated of all British scientists Work in cracking Nazi codes at Bletchley Park and his role in the evolution of the computer earned him worldwide acclaim he died at the age of just forty one twoo years after being prosecuted for homosexual acts In this episode of the History Extra podcast, David Kenyon Research historian at Bletchley Park Tells Spencer Mizen about a brilliant life marred by tragedy David, it's a real pleasure to welcome you to the History extra cast today to talk about the life and legacy of Alan Choring As a research historian at Mchley Park, you're clearly very familiar with Doruring's life and work. You've done plenty of research into him and written about him With this in mind, I wonder if you could give our listeners a quick introduction to doring How significant in your opinion was his contribution to modern British history? Well, Alan Ting's contribution to British history to where we are today is very, very important on a number of levels. The obvious one from Blexy Park's point of view is that he was instrumental in breaking a number of German cipher systems during World War II And obviously, that gave the Allied powers a tremendous advantage during the war. and Eisenhower wrote a letter saying it had contributed significantly to Allied victory. So his role in World War two is the most obvious one But he was also a mathematician and logician of great powers. and significance And this begins before the war when he was at Cambridge in the nineteen thirties He wrote paper, a published paper about a rather obscure mathematical problem In it he hypothesized a machine, which I believe we'll talk about later, which was kind of the the thought parent of all computers that have existed since. So in that sense, he is one of the theoretical fathers of modern computing And that that legacy of course is as I'm speaking to you now, you know we wouldn't be doing this had that not happened. So really, really important. So he achieved some truly extraordinary things in his life. I wonder if we could now rewind to the beginning of that life. Can you tell us about Choruring's early years and maybe give us an insight into How those formative years sort shaped the man and the scientist that Toring would on to become. Chururing is a child of emmpire in the sense that his father worked for the Indian Civil Service out in India and his elder brother was actually born in India He was born in the UK because his mother Sarah came back to the UK Before you spown But then at an extremely early age, he was fostered to a family in Kent who brought him up As a foster child and his parents went back to India. so he had childhood with his brother but away from his parents in his very early years And then he went to a prep school or junior boarding school at the age of about eight. and then subsequently on onto Sherborne school. So his upbringing, he was forced to be quite independent from a very early age. He didn't live sort of in the bosom of his family It's to that. I mean, his foster parents were amazing people and they brought him up very well. but He was separated from his parents And I wouldn't say it was typical for children in the nineteenth century, but for children within his sort of class, within people who worked in government and military in India, it was not unusual for this situation to prevail that people would have their children raised in the UK while they were serving overseas And so he went to Sherborne. I mean, did he enjoy that? Would you say he was happy at school? I think he was broadly. Some of the stories of Curing tend to set him up in sort of nowadays we call it, he was on the sort of nerd side, not the jock side, if you like. And there is a suggestion that he was somehow isolated or miserable He was a man of solitary pursuits or a child of solitary pursuits. He was a great reader and a great experimenter, his housemaster complained that he He would set up little experiments on the window sill of his study and there would be noxious smells wotting down the corridor But the research I've done shows that he was also a sportsman. He played rugby for his house at Sherbourne. And later enough he was a runner, of course. So it's possible to be a scholar and an athlete I think he was both in a way that he doesn't necessarily get credit for because people tend to shoebox him as the The scholar nerdred in the corner, which I don't think he was. Can you tell us a little bit about his friendship with somebody called Christopher Morcam? because that friendship and the way the friendship ended would have a profound impact on the young Choring, wouldn't it? It would, yes. I mean he became friends with Christopher Morcham, who was in another house at Jerbourn a different boarding house And the way the school was set up, you weren't encouraged really to hang around with people from other houses. There was a lot of competition between them He and Morcam were in some of the same classes and spent time in the library. And they really bonded over their interest in mathematics and science and they would spend long periods discussing abstruse mathematical questions and speculating about science And Morcam was interested in astronomy in particular and he influenced Turing's influence in astronomy significantly. I think Morcam had a telescope and they would look at the stars and talk about astronomy. Sadly, Morcam contracted bovine TB in his six formmer years at school died when Turing would have been about eighteen. The two of them had actually gone up to Cambridge to be interviewed for iions at Cambridge Univers Morecomam wanted to Trinity College and Turing wants to go to Trinity College as well, so he could be there with Morcomb. Unfortunately, shortly after they returned from their visit in their Sick fororm year, Morcomb died and Turing was hit very badly by Morcham's death But interestingly, he got in touch with Christopher's mother. And he seems to have established a very good relationship with her and with the Morcam family more widely. And he holidayed with them that summer and he kept in touch with Christopher's mother for many years. I think she She provided an alternative to Sarah Curing to Cing's own mother She was a poetess and she kept goats and she was quite for the nineteen thirties quite a sort of flamboyant boohemian character And I think Ellan Turing enjoyed that. And so A number of letters survive in his correspondence between Mrs. Morcamb and him and he would go and stay with them and all the rest of it. that He's a sort of powerful influence on his late teen years He persisted in trying to go to Cambridge, but Trinity College wouldn't have him. so he actually ended up as we know at Kings's College Why wouldn't Trinity College h him I don't know, especially in mathematics, they are very exclusive college. You know, you have to be best of the best mathematically to go to Trinity But more importantly, he was looking for a funded place for a scholarship, essentially. And he didn't get one He got one of Kingings, so he was clearly up there with the brightest people. But the other thing about Morcomb is he does write to Mrs. Morcomb that he felt that Christopher had work that he would have done maths and science and that Allan felt an inspiration to sort of pick up the torch and do the things that Christopher would have done. So it certainly spurred him in his academic endeavors in that regard. Okay, so he goes to King's College. what point did Chorin's genius first become apparent? people around him started to kind of look at him and say, you know wow this guy's something special. Well, not straight away, it's apparent in his letters to his mother and in Cambridge Records that In his first year, he didn't get top marks and he was slightly embarrassed that he hadn't performed as well as he'd hoped When he finished his undergraduate degree, he wrote a short dissertation which was basically an application to become a fellow And it was good enough that they made him a feellllow of the college which meant he had some teaching responsibility, but also he had a place to live, three square meals a day and funding to do his own research. And it's at that point as a fellow of the college that he really starts to move into territory that is really new in terms of his work. Chureren's sexuality, he was a gay man is an important part of his story with, as we'll discuss later tragic consequences in his later life How open was he about his sexuality, especially when he got to Kingss What impact did that have on his time at Kings' College and on the early stages of his career? I think it's a very nuanced sort of situation in the nineteen thirties because homose sexual activity remained illegal until the nineteen sixties. And so you couldn't be openly homosexual or certainly not. openly practicing, but Cambridge University and Kings' Coege in particular had a very liberal sort of tradition and You get the impression that it was quite easy to live not openly but sort of tacitly as a gay man at Kings's College And we know that there are another number of individuals who we know have been other gay men who were also at Kings's College at the time. So And it was kind of an open secret in the college that he had several relationships with other men. It's one of those don't ask, don't tell kind of situations. and I think That made life qu quite comfortable for him There were intellectual societies which were particularly friendly to other gay men and kings, but he wasn't one of the sort of popular social set to hang around necessarily in those groups So some of the more famous Cambridge gay men of the time were sort of more more visible, if you like One of my conclusions about him in later life was that The only place was he really felt at home was Cambridge University and at Kings Coege in particular. And throughout his life, whether he was his fellowship continued or not, he tended to go back there I think it was his happy place. So did he feel that he could express himself more openly there without fear of judgment? I think so. We know of other gay individuals at Blexy Park who were much more flamboyantly and openly camp, if you like. He was never that. But he was comfortable and able to You know, he could speak free to people One of the subjects that we may get ont to when we talk about his his personality is that people often suggest that he was quite awkward in social situations, things like that. and that has been attributed to neodiversity or something like that. But my view is that if you are having to be cautious about your sexuality, in a time when it is illegal. Inevitably, if you go into a big room full of strangers, you're going to be kindind of on your guard in a way that a straight person wouldn't be But I feel that Kings's certainly was a place where he could relax completely. He didn't have to guard his words, if you know what me. Okay, so let's look at that in a little bit more detail what did Pe who came into contact with Choruring, write about him, say about him. What was he like as a person? What was it like to be in a room with Alan Choring? And on top of that, you mentioned earlier that he enjoyed running. I mean how did he relax from his scientific research? What hobbies did he have? Well, at Cambridge, he took up rowing and he rode in a college A reasonably successfully. have we have some of his bumps trophies in our display case here at Bletchy Park. And he was popular in the Rowing club. he spent a lot of time there In terms of if you met him, if you went into a room, no audio recordings of him survive, which is a shame. He did several talks on the BBC, but unfortunately none of them were recorded. so we don't know what he actually sounded like, but he had quite a high pitched voice and when he was thinking, he would say something and then he would kind of go, A Well he was thinking of his next thought So he would be awkward to talk to and thatays, but Almost everybody who knew him personally described his sense of humor. They said he was a funny guy and what he wanted to be and obviously a very clever guy. And I think when he was at his happiest, it was when he was talking to people firstly with whom he could relax, but secondly with whom he could have conversations that he considered interesting, which would mean quite high level you know, scientific or literary or mathematical conversations. He wasn't a guy for small talk. It wasn't really his thing. But if there was somebody who he could engage with on his level, if you like, he would chat away and be Very entertaining The other thing that comes out is he was very comfortable around children and a number of people said how good he was with their kids and how He was veryer friendly Max Newman, in particular, who was his mentor at Manchter, but also worked at Gletchure Park Max's son spent a lot of time with turing as a child and they They played board games together and did puzzles and people felt that he was really good with kids in that way. He had an ability to sort of return to a kind of childish frame of mind And I think this is significant in his academic work and his legacy more generally that what drives not only his mathematical work, but also his biological work and morphogenesis and everything else is he has this sort of childlike sense of wonder. he's fascinated by things of all kinds The question he asks about all things is, well, how does that work You know, how does that come about and this endless curiosity, he wouldn't be satisfied to be told o, it works like this. he'd have to understand it himself. So he spend his Research can be viewed in some regards as a slightly scatter gun because he sees things and he goes, Oh, that's really interesting. and he picks it up and he prods it and pokes it and unpicks it and figures something it out. But once he thinks he's got to grips with it. He'll kind of drop it and pick up something else, you know So that sense of enthusiastic inquiry I think is real strong feature of his character. and I think if you caught him on a day when he was really fired up to be interested in something, he could be a fascinating and Really engaging chap Let's talk about the maths in a bit more detail then David. and you're can have to bear with me a little bit here. I scraped a C at Maths GCSE thirty eight years ago, so I can't be described as an expert. I got O level, but that was forty four years ago so. So both quite a long time ago then we can safely agree. But I wonder if you could talkalk us through perhaps twowo or three of the great breakthroughs that you achieved in the nineteen thirties you know really mark him out as a greatreat in the field of computer science. I'm thinking here for example, of Turing's proof The famous churing machine, and although this was a little bit later, the churing pattern. Well, the really important moment is in nineteen thirty five when as a fellow, he writes with Max Newman, who was at Cambridge at the time and was sort of his mentor in mathematics He started working on The Echidg problem in German, translates as the decidability problem And this is a concept in mathematics. where The question is whether it is possible that all things in maths can be resolved that you can write an algorithm that would give you the answer to any problem. And some mathematicians had argued that actually maths is fundamentally unproable on some levels. There are some aspects of mathematics that while they appear to be true You could never rigorously demonstrate them using logic And Turing addressed this problem in a paper called on Computable numumbers, which was published in nineteen thirty six. He basically proved that the decidability problem in Silding's problem existed that maths was not fundamentally provable. this uncertainty principle girdle applied. Actually, that discovery was not massively groundbreaking because another mathematician called Alonso Church, who was working at Princeton at the time had actually proved the same thing. Newuman went to the London Mathematical Society who were publishing the paper and said, L Even though churches reached the same conclusion, Curing has reached that conclusion by such a different working methodology that his proof is also really important because he kind of attacked the problem from a different direction But what makes that paper significant beyond the world of mathematical logic is that in it, as part of his proof of the decidability problem Turing did a thought experiment. He hypothesized an imaginary machine which becomes referred to as the seuringing machine. And what it did was it did very simple logical procedures on an imaginary paper tape. Basically the machine could print characters on the tape and delete characters on the tape and print different ones and move up and down And Turing demonstrated that by giving this machine step by step instructions by programming it as we call it nowadays al'llad and use that term that this machine could do almost all mathematical calculations But the reason it was important in the paper was he demonstrated that there were some mathematical calculations that the machine would never be able to do O it would get stuck in an infinite loop and never resolve itself. So that thoughtought experiment. I don't think Turing laid it out envisioning that this would be embodied in digital machines in the future. He was just using it as an argument within a paper about mathematics As soon as people read the paper, they realized that this theoretical device was actually really important from the point of view of a theory of computing and how machines could do maths basically And so one of the slight misunderstandings about it is people talk about a turing machine as if you could build one or that it existed as a physical device. It didn't. It would be impossible to build one because what it actually does is while very simple, actually very, very complicated. And so it only really exists as a theoretical concept. But it's a theoretical concept that has inspired and underpinned computer development ever since. It's striking that Tururing didn't propose it by accident, but he didn't propose it in order to invent computing. He proposed it in order to solve a specific problem. But one of the consequences of that was he was then able to takeake up a post at Princeton in the United States And Princeton is really important in this story because the Institute for Advanced Study recently been established Pineton, and this was a a sort of think tank of the brightest brains in the world. And so when Chururing went to Princeton in nineteen o six, nineteen oh seven, he was in a world that included not only Alonso Church, but you know Einstein was there, for example Clae Shannon was there, who is one of the other founding figures in computing The great mathematical brains from the whole world were there. And in particular at that point in the nineteen thirties, there had been an exodus of European mathematicians from Hungary. I'm from Germany John von Neman, people like that who would move to the states because of Nazism. So you get this little moment of a kind of hotbed of talent thinking about mathematics and computing. And what's interesting is that the Second World War follows on And some of those people end up at Blexy Park. Some of those people end up in Los Alamos on the Manhattan proroject working on the Atom bomb And then they all reconvene confferences and at Princeton I things in the late nineteen forties And you can argue that there's a pool of probably a dozen people, including Alllan Turing who are subsequently responsible both for the digital age and for nuclear weapons, which are the kind of the two things that define the late twentiet and twenty first century, I think. It's really striking that he's in that group at that time in the nineteen thirties. You've just mentioned Bletchley Park there, David. As I said at the start, you're the research historian at Bletchley Park like they're doing this interview now As most people know, Bletchleey is sort of the iconic code breaking site, famous for an incredible work that was done there in the Second World War. And your is well qualified, I imagine as anyone to talk about this next stage insuring's life and when Was the idea of choring going into to Blechley and sort of lending you his incredible brain power to the fight against Germany? When was that first moted? Well, it was first mooted in nineteen thirty seven and nineteen thirty eight because a man called Alis D Denniston was the head of an organisation called the Government Code and Cypher School. And this was Britain's code brereaking agency, and it had been established back in nineteen nineteen at the end of World War I based in London as part of the Secret intelligence Serice, but Dennison knew that a war was potentially imminent. And he applied to the foreign office who his bosses to say, I need to build my organization, I need to recruit a lot more people because he only had a team of between fif thousand and hundred people at that point And so he compiled what he called a list of men of a professor type. And what he did was he went out to his old boy network, and it was mostly boys to find people who he could augment his code brereaking team with in event of war And as I jokeed to our visitors he spread his net incredibly widely. He went to both Oxford and Cambridge. In the end there are about a hundred people, most of men, some women as well. were identified by his friends and connections. And these people were sort of discreetly tapped on the shoulder and told There's a thing the government's very interested you in doing, wouldould you be available? And if they said yes Turing, for example, went on training courses at in London at GCS headquarters in March of nineteen thirty nine Basically they went for two weeks and they were given an introduction to cryptalysis and the sorts of things they might be doing. And then they went back to there mostly to their academic jobs. Do you get the sense that Toruring was energized by the prospect of lending his knowledge to the war effort? It's notable that some of the other people who were on the emergency list did a training and then went away and then got a telegram on the first of September saying, comeome back Cering remained in touch with GCNCS and throughout the summer of nineteen thirty nine, he worked with Dlwyin Knox, who was head of research on the German Enigma code system Turing worked with Knox that summer and indeed stayed with Knox in his house So I think that he was bitten by the bug of the enigma problem once he was introduced to it And as I say, this goes back to his fundamental curiosity about things. It was like here was a problem that was clearly very, very challenging that nobody else was able to figure out. and that was meat and drink to druring. That's exactly the kind of thing he liked to do. And so He spends the whole summer of nineteen thirty nine. and when he comes to Bletchy and fourth of September, he carries on in a small team of about half a dozen people banging their heads against German enigma. and by Christmas of that year, they figured out a solution. so incredibly significant work, but I think he relished it to a certain extent. OkayK, there were obviously a lot of brilliant minds at Bletchley during the war. What in particular did Alan Choring bring to the party? why is his name in particular so synonymous with Blchley? It's interesting that it is synonymous because They were all Other people who did equivalent work, broke other code systems, were geniuses in different ways hisis story seems to have captured the public imagination There's no doubt that the work he did, the ideas he had around how you could break German enigma and naval enigma, especially were absolutely game changing from the point of view of Blechy Park's ability to read German message traffic. So The fact that he was able to contribute to that come up with some of the fundamental ideas involved in solving that problem is massive, you know, the organization is as big as it was. It was nearly ten thousand people by the end of the war The reason you need ten thousand people is because you can break enigma and you can break enigma because Alan Turing came up with a way of doing it. So how important was this work? How did the work that was going on in Bletchley Park impact the course of the Second World War? Well the example I often give, we have an exhibition about it and I wrote a book about it is D day I mean, we've all heard of the Normandy invasion. People tend to think of Blexy Park as a bit like a news agency that The Germans would send a message and the British would read it and they say, o yesterday, the Germans did this or tomorrow the Germans are going to do that. Actually the process is a lot more complex than that. And it's more about collecting thousands and thousands of messages and integrating them all together and indexing all that information and creating a very large picture of who your enemy is, where they are, what they're going to do And for D Day in particular, a team at Blettshy Park worked specifically on that challenge for from october nineteen forty two, for nearly two years, they're collecting Nugget by nugget information about the Germans. And what that means is when the generals come to plan the Normy invasion, they know How many Germans there are? where they are, all fifty eight divisions. they know their order of battle, they know how many tanks they've got, they know how their communications work, they know their generals' birthdays They have a really complete picture of their enemy. And that means that you can fight a battle with a tremendous advantage. A historian at GCHQ described as information dominance this idea that knowledge is power and by working in such volume, by breaking thousands and thousands of messages and integrating all of that information, it gives you these huge information advantage and the Normy campaign is successful. This can be applied in other theaters of war, you know, be it the Battle of the Atlantic or Italy or wherever the information that is able to be gleaned from not just breaking one or two coded messages, but literally breaking thousands of messages on an industrial scale means that the information advantage that the Allied powers have is absolutely tremendous. And you mentioned earlier that Choran's name is synonymous with Bletchley. Why do you think that is? Why do you think when you most people think of Bletchley, he's probably the first name that comes to mind? It's an unfortunate term to use about someone who died so young, but there is a sort of romance about his story and about how He did all this amazing work during the war and he made such an influence on the world we live in then He suffered as a consequence of his sexuality and then he ultimately died before his time And so that gives gives an edge to his a story that if he perhaps had lived to a ripe old age and become an aged learned professor at King's College. We would think about him in a different way. And one of the things that I sometimes speculate about is that Mathematicians tend to do their best work very young there's no doubt that Turing would have had more things to say, which would have been important. And some of our veterans here at Blety Park, The fact that they were at Blxy Park is kind of incidental in their biographies because they went on to be you know, great authors or government ministers or whatever And so I think in that regard, had turing lived longer Bletchley would perhaps fade in his biography in favour of other more important achievements. So what did he do after Bletchley?bviously the war finished in ' forty five. Where did he go next? Well, immmediately in ' forty five, he had been working with Max Newman not full time. went to Hansleake Park and was devising a speech encryption system still higher But after the war, he went to the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington in London They were working on one of the first British computers a machine called Ace and he stayed at Teddington for a couple of years. But in nineteen forty eight, I think Max Newman, who was his mentor at Cambridge and then he worked with the Bletchley Max Newman had gone to Manchester to set up the Royal Society computing center at Manchter University and churing was getting a little bit progress on the computer at Teddington Newman managed to persuade him to go to Manchester. and so he went up to Manchester and I can't remember it was said this phrase to me, but it' very important that Turing didn't build a computer, but he worked on a computer because He did all the designs for the Ace machine at Teddington. That didn't get built until after he'd left And then he went to Manchester and at that point, Newman's team which includes a couple of other people with Blety Park actually. The Manchester Mark one the Mstter baby and the Mstter Mark quand that they built there were more or less finished, but what Tururing did was come in and he wrote the first programming manual for that computer and he was very key to understanding what it could do and its potential And so having been at Tellington for a couple of years he then moved to Manchester and he remained li inanchester and un employed by Manester University until his death in nineteen fifty four We also know that he was an informal consultant for GCHQ and for the government. So he was still involved in code breaking work, but the nature of that work remains classified so we don't actually know what he was doing. Okay, here's a quick note for our listeners. If you'd like to deve further into this subject, Then why not check out the article about the secrets and undervalued work of the female codebreakers of Bletchley Park, which is on the History extxtra website I'll leave the link to that article in this podcast show notes So Torin's life story is one of clearly a brilliance of genius of triumph. but It's also one that ended in tragedy. Homosexual acts were illegal in Britain In the nineteen fifties and in nineteen fifty two, Choring was convicted of gross indecency and he subsequently consented to chemical castration rather than face imprisonment Can you describe the events that led to his conviction? I can. Turing was living in Wilms though. he had a house there. and he was still an active homosexual and he would he would go into Manchester to meet other gay men because there was an underground gay scene in Manchester in the nineteen fifties And he met a young man called Arnold Murray and they began a relationship, but Unfortunately, a friend of Murray's heard about this posh bloope that Murray was going out with and decided to burgle his house. So Turing's house was burgled and He went to the police and the police said, What do you know about this? he rather naively told the police, well, I think the burglary might have been done by this chap that I was in a relationship with And the police kind of went, wait a minute. never mind the burglary What's what are you and Arnold up to? And that was what he was prosecuted for The burglar was subsequently procuted as well, and it's interesting that in his remarks to the police, he was quite frank about it but he said, Oh, I didn't think those things were very important anymore. There was a climate for change at the time. around the discriminatory laws against homosexuality, but The necessary legal changes hadn't actually happened yet. so He was he was duly charged and pleed guilty in court There is some of the sort of mythology around our enuring will suggest that In some sense, the government threw them to the wolves at this point, but that's actually the reverse is true. Max Newman, who is his boss at Manchester University, appeared as a character witness in court And Hugh Alexander, who had worked at Blexhy Park and was now working for GCHQ also Cayman was a character witness for him in court. So too the extent that they could do anything, his professional and government connections were trying to stick up for him. but They weren' in a situation that they could just overrule the law of the land and much of what he was doing had been secret, so they couldn't really defend him overtly in that sense. So he is sentenced to receive a estrogen derivative supplement for twelve months which he does It has a variety of quite unpleasant physical changes on him But after twelve months, he writes in his surviving correspondence that sort of on the day that the twelve months expired, he'd had a capsule placed in his leg which slow released chemicals. And he went straight back toospital and said, you can take that out now because I'm done, sort of thing And so it was extremely unpleasant. but after the twelve months My understanding is that the symptoms receded and he was able to get on with his life. But it had had a number of impacts because with a criminal conviction, his government security clearances were rescinded so he could no longer do his consulting work for GCHQ And his ability to visit the United States was affected So he was less able to go to America if he wanted. I don't think he just desperate to go to America, but it was one of the long term consequences of his sentence So the conviction would quite clearly have had a significant impact on both his professional and private life then. It did, yes. It's one of the controversial areas of his biography is that He's sentenced in january nineteen fifty two and He is found dead in june nineteen fifty four And some people make a direct connection between the two and Although his death may have been accidental, we don't know. The coroner's verdict at the time was that he committed suicide And people have suggested that there is a link between his experiences after his prosecution and his death Whether that's the case or not, we will never know. I've read mostost of the material that's available about churing and including a lot of his letters, and it's difficult to prove a link between the two events in my mind his correspondence after his treatment is over. suggests that he is he's reasonably cheerful, he's getting on with his life And so his death in nineteen fifty four comes as a surprise if you're reading the literature, but also to his friends at the time. people went Well this is weird. Well you know what why is he dead? You know, we saw him on Thursday, he seemed absolutely fine. The exact personal and psychological impact of his conviction is It's really hard to nail down. Sure. Now Choram was given a royal pardon for his Conviction for rose indecency in twenty thirteen, which was to put it mildly somewhat overdue How important a moment was this? and why do you think it took so long? I think it's extremely important Although the legislation had been repealed by I I think it's the Sexual Offensces Act of nineteen sixty seven There were many people still alive, many men who had been convicted of these offences in the forties and fifties who still had criminal records, still had this stigma hanging over them And Gordon Brown had issued his official apology to cheering as Prim Minister back in two thousand nine, but That was just him in all the other people who'd been convicted, you know, they were still out there And so there was a campaign that using because he was he was becoming a very, very recognizable figure you know, around the world his his sort of fame was growing. He was a great exemplar of the injustice of the law. And so there was a campaign started in the House of Commons to change the law had already been changed, but to institute a system whereby The previous convictions could be setet aside is the technical term, I think. And In the course of that process, he was given an individual pardon by the late Queen. The problem with pardons is If you're pardon of an offence, it implies that you were rightightly prosecuted for it, but they've let you off And a great many people felt that pardon was the wrong term because he hadn't committed an offence in the first place And so the law that was changed in twenty thirteen, or coming exactly when the law was changed, there were various stages in this process The law is specifically framed so that people who had a conviction can apply to have that conviction effectively deleted as if it had never happened. and their record cleared, which is really important. and it's slightly oddly framed because if the person who was prosecuted It's deceased, it happens automatically But if you're still alive, you have to fill in a form, you have to apply I mean, it's a diminishing number of people now who carry these convictions, but The fact that they can they are being symbolically set aside is really important within the LGBTQ plus community, it's recognition that what was done was wrong which is really important. and Turing stands as a figure in the public sphere who suffered this injustice. And so he's a great representative of a much wider group of people and historic prejudice in general. and so he's really important from that point of view. and We are aware here at Bletsley Park that his status as a very significant figure within the LGBT community It does bring people to the park and we have a responsibility to to acknowledge that aspect of his character and his importance in that world ure. And his face is now on the fifty pound note, of course and the Toruring Award recognizes contributions of Larsson and Major technical importance to computer science. so it does finally feel that he's getting the recognition he deserves. His recognition worldwide is absolutely astonishing. We did a piece of research looking at his his place in pop culture, if you like. and you can it's amazing. You can get his morphal genetic patterns that he developed in his later career, he drew colored diagrams of them. and those have inspired artwork. You can get them on t shirts, you get them on shoes The most astonishing thing was we discovered that a Filipino rapper had written a rap in honor of Curing in Tagalog in the Philippines. That's incredible. And that shows just how We have a Spotify playlist of touring inspired music from all over the world. And it's rather brilliant that that so many people know of him, but also find him an inspiration. You know, we need more people in STEM subjects, We need more people to do math and science we need to encourage not just straight white men to do it. We need to get everybody involved. So he's a wonderful exemplar of that even though he suffered, an extreme injustice. I was at Bledchley Park a few weeks ago. There's an exhibition on there at the moment about the evolution of AI posossible to draw, do you think, a direct line between Chorin's work and the advent of artificial intelligence. and What do you think Sorin would make of the world of AI and twenty first century computer science if he was still alive today? I thinkd I told you so. What's interesting about his work post war in particular is Although he's working on the contemporary computing of the nineteen fifties. He's programming the Manchester Mark one and things he's much more significant as sort of futroologist. He writes a number of academic papers In particular, his paper in the Journal Mind in nineteen fifty where he uses the phrase can machines think and he He wasn't really so much interested in how do you build a nineteen fifties computer in the relatively primitive way that they functioned at the time. He was saying right given the premise that we can build ever better computers Where does that lead us Will there be a day when, for example, the famous turing test, willill there be a day when An average person will encounter a computer and they can't tell the difference between a computer and a human being And that's the so called during test. And it's arguable that know we all brush up against bots when our social media doesn't work or when our Amazon parcel hasn't arrived. So that we already living in that age and his predictions about there were predictions? There were speculations. he was going What is it about a human brain that makes it special? Will there be a time when a machine can effectively mimic that on whatever level? We are living in those times now, peopleople are thinking about and designing machines around those exact concepts. So I think you can make a very clear link between what he suggested might happen back in the nineteen fifties and what is happening now, you know seventy years later And any if you ask anyone in the world of AI, you know Turing is a significant person to them because he made these predictions. he thought about he's one of the first people to really think about these questions and to Not necessarily to solve to come up with answers, but to pose other important questions. And he also populized it. I mean, he went on the BBC talking about this and he gave talkks saying, you know in the future, will this be the world we live in? what implications does that have for us and that is Pfoundly important, I think Because now we still haven't got there. know Turing questions are still open questions in a way. Will there ever be a machine that can completely mimic a bra? I don't know He was one of the first people to ask. David, that seems like a really great place to wrap this interview out. So thank you so much. That was absolutely fascinating. Thank you for your time. It's my pleasure That was David Kenyon speaking to Spencer Men David is the research historian at Bletchley Park His books include Bletchley Park and D D, The untold Story of how the Battle for Normandy was won