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Out of
Print
Here is
another in our series of reprints of
articles from earlier issues of the
print version of G&LH.
In
G&LH, Summer 2004,
Andrew
Hodges wrote this article to mark
the fiftieth anniversary of the
death of Alan Turing. |
Alan Turing –
An Enigma
After Fifty Years
In August 2003, I gave a
talk on Alan Turing at the new Imperial War
Museum North, a symbol of post-industrial
Manchester. The talk was also part of the
programme of the EuroPride week, another
such symbol. This article is based on that
talk, linking themes of war, sexuality and
science. A few extra points mark the fifty
years since Alan Turing’s death on 7 June
1954.
Alan Turing was the chief
scientific figure in the British
codebreaking effort in the Second World War,
making a crucial contribution to breaking
the Enigma ciphers. He was also the person
who got the idea of the computer from an
abstruse problem in mathematical logic, and
did his best to bring about the IT
revolution with his own hands. And he was a
gay man who lived in Manchester for his last
six years, and would have revelled in
EuroPride.
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Andrew Hodges
(New York, 2002) |
Alan Turing was only 41
when he died. In all he did he was ahead of
his time. When very young at Cambridge in
the 1930s, he saw his theory of “computable
numbers” and with it the theory of today’s
computers. The Second World War came in one
way as an interruption to this theoretical
work, absorbing him totally in the Enigma
and other ciphers. But in another sense it
fulfilled his work by providing the
electronic engineering to make his computer
a practical project.
In continuing his work in
founding computer science, Turing went to
the National Physical Laboratory, London,
until 1948, and then switched impatiently to
Manchester. It was here that he formulated
the Turing Test, famous as a materialist and
atheistic exposition of how human
intelligence would one day be rivalled by
computers, based on his theory of
computability. Less famous were his ideas in
mathematical biology and physics, decades
ahead of their time.
Time did not work well
for Alan Turing, and nor did his social
space, with culture clashes between pure
science, engineering and philosophy; between
war work and intellectual life; and in
trying to be an honest gay man when sex was
illegal. These conflicts made him often at
odds with others, and so did his
personality, awkward, uncompromising, and
manic-depressive.
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Alan Turing |
Informal, rowing or
running, in shorts and no tie, he was a
hippie misplaced in the 1930s (though
serious enough about running to become a
leading marathon runner by 1948). “Phoney”
was his favourite term of abuse, along with
“salesman, charlatan, politician”. But there
was an obvious impossibility about this
demand for honesty, when he was so wrapped
up in silences of all kinds. The sheer
incommunicable difficulty of computers and
cryptography and mathematics was bad enough,
but he had the deepest official secrecy, and
his taboo sexuality, laid on top.
All these factors made
him a loner. At King’s College, Cambridge,
his individualism could thrive, with his
work in mathematical logic, the work of a
complete outsider, coming to fruition in
1936. His interest in ciphers also began as
an individualist, until the looming war
induced him to offer his services to the
Government in 1938. He was the first British
scientific figure to work on the Enigma
ciphers, which had defeated the
language-based codebreakers of the First
World War. The Polish mathematicians were
ahead, but the British “super-Bombe”
codebreaking machine, built in 1940, was
based on Turing’s logical brainwave.
He was on his own in
tackling the most difficult Enigma ciphers,
as used by U-boats; we know now that his
determination to crack them ran against a
prevailing defeatism; we know that he saw it
as a personal challenge, to do it because no
one else was trying. He succeeded – and,
beyond this, he recruited and led other
mathematicians with a new statistical theory
of rational guessing.
His leading status meant
he was sent by ship to New York at the
height of the battle of the Atlantic, as the
technical liaison with American
cryptographers. Alan Turing emerged in 1945
as one person who knew the future of
computation, but no-one else knew he knew.
He could never reveal his own experience
when trying to get computers built, and this
was one reason why he was unsuccessful in
practice.
Boyfriends
He was not completely on
his own with his sexuality. At King’s it
could be talked about, and more. He had some
boyfriends, though not a major affair. But,
even there, he had an individuality that
no-one could share: the young death at
school of the boy he had fallen in love
with, and the way that this trauma had done
much to inspire his scientific life. Nor did
Alan Turing fit into the aesthetic
Bloomsbury world favoured in King’s. The war
took him out of this upper-class shell, just
as it shook up a whole population. It gave
him the chance of a marriage of convenience
which many others would have taken; he
declined it. Thus it obliged him to define
his identity more positively. Liberation and
modernity were in the air, and he went with
the future. It was probably in 1942, while
on his mission to the United States, that he
discovered more democratic kinds of sexual
opportunity. After the war he had a
boyfriend called Neville, a Geordie lad at
Cambridge.
On the Oxford Road,
Manchester, in December 1951, he made a
fateful “pick-up”, as he described it to the
police when arrested on the day George VI
died. His whole attitude was that such laws
were outdated and ridiculous, and he told
the police, wrongly, that he thought there
was a Royal Commission sitting to legalise
it. Alan Turing breathed the air of
modernity, but as usual he was premature by
decades and had to suffer the
ancien régime.
As a boyfriend, Alan
Turing had his defects, but he did have that
GSOH now always sought in personal
advertisements.
Turing believes
machines think
Turing lies with
men
Therefore
machines do not think
He wrote to a gay friend,
playing on the status he enjoyed having as a
God-denying “heretic” for proposing
Artificial Intelligence. His famous Turing
Test proposed in 1950 was, in fact, a sort
of Turing Trial, and as such anticipated the
real courtroom drama that, perhaps,
he guessed might one day happen.
He was humorous and open
in the Manchester computer laboratory about
the forthcoming trial, unfazed by its
laddish ambience to a degree that was
remarkable given that the affair was no
romance and showed him as a twit as well as
a victim. But then Alan Turing was showing
more conscious resistance, in the face of a
more consciously persecuting state. In this
he followed a wave of new gay consciousness
and literature, which he read, recommending
André Gide. He himself started to write a
short story modelled on Angus Wilson’s, of
which only the first pages survive. As for
the outcome of the trial, where he
unapologetically pleaded guilty, no sense of
humour was shown to him, unless one counts
the black humour of a Fellow of the Royal
Society being treated with scientific “organotherapy”:
female hormones injected in a vain attempt
to erase his interest in sex.
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The talk on which this
article is based was written for two
audiences: the Imperial War Museum and
EuroPride. Here they merge: the taboo themes
of sex and war come together. For although
the pick-up and its discovery were classics
of the 1950s genre, Alan Turing’s situation
was unique. It was almost the worst thing
that could have happened for a British
government dependent on American trust.
Vetting, lightly applied in the war, had
changed after 1948, when “perversion” became
a totem of American “security” paranoia.
Alan Turing was stopped from the work for
GCHQ he had done since
1948. Even if he had argued that he had
stood up to blackmail, as indeed he had, he
could hardly deny that as a gay man it was
his habit to mix in unpredictable social
milieux, utterly the wrong sets. Alan Turing
par excellence
always did his own thing.
Alan Turing’s gay pride
had a definite Euro-component. It seems that
he heard about how a gay movement had begun
in Scandinavia, and in the summer of 1952 he
escaped from the English prison to Norway.
In Spring 1953 a young man whom he had
chatted up in Bergen turned up in Newcastle
hoping to stay with him, and was forthwith
intercepted by police – the “poor sweeties”,
as Turing called them. In Summer 1953, it
was escape to Europe again, this time
arriving back with a list of contacts he had
made in Paris and Athens (a list that was
destroyed in the 1970s at, it so happened,
the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment,
Aldermaston).
Symphonie Pathétique
Alan Turing was defiant
in continuing both his exploratory gay life
and his new ideas in scientific work; he
never seemed to buckle, and there has always
rightly been resistance to any easy
assumption that his death in 1954 was
suicide. He would have been as aware as
anyone else of the weary cultural tradition
of Oscar Wilde, of the Symphonie
Pathétique, and reluctant to
reinforce it. But even now, youth suicide is
still a depressing reality, and almost
certainly that was his reality too. He used
potassium cyanide and a symbolic apple,
contrived to look like a careless chemical
accident, and so left open for anyone to
form their own judgment.
We don’t know what
happened. Cryptic jokes in his last
postcards, wrapped up in God-teasing fun,
suggest that the issue was his yen for
rule-breaking “free association”. Was he
being stopped from going abroad again? If
the state wanted to assert itself seriously,
as it might well have done in the climate of
1954, he might indeed have felt shattered by
it. Duty and freedom; honesty and secrecy;
the war of the past, and the spirit of the
future, were in complete contradiction.
Above all he was completely isolated: no one
knew all his worlds, certainly not his
Jungian psychoanalyst.
I have emphasised moral
conflict rather than the questions of who
was cleverest, who was first, that are
usually asked in science. But in fact these
moral questions are, thanks to the breadth
of Alan Turing’s work, connected with
scientific ones. He himself placed the
phenomena of initiative and originality, the
appearances of will and choice, which seem
so unlike anything done by computers, at the
heart of the question of “intelligence”. It
is a paradox that his own life was the least
computer-like that could be imagined, both
original and wilful to a degree, and
possessing an integrity that was nothing to
do with cleverness.
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The Wolfenden Committee
was set up in 1954, since when, by
desperately slow steps, there has at least
been a cessation of hostilities from the
British state. Everyone called Alan Turing
naïve, but, in the long run, that
self-affirming naïveté, as since expressed
by thousands of ordinary people, has been
the lasting and vital factor. His openness
anticipated the liberationist change of the
1970s, and a simple choice for same-sex
intertwining is now seen as a European human
right; the problem is the American religious
right. Fifty years later, Alan Turing’s
story is still full of life.
Andrew Hodges is a Tutorial
Fellow in Mathematics at Wadham College,
Oxford. He is the author of Alan
Turing: the Enigma (reviewed in the
Spring 1985 issue of
The Gay Humanist) and the
Alan Turing website.
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