Alan Turing: The Enigma

Rating:
Summary: Turing Explained - Turing Hijacked
Review: Alan Turing makes an absolutely fascinating subject for biography. Not only did Turing significantly contributed to the allied victory in World War II, but one may also consider him to be the father of the modern "thinking machine." Indeed, most introductory computer textbooks still contain references to the "Turing test" for artificial intelligence.

In Part 1, Hodges writes a riveting account of Turing's youth, scientific pursuits, and war-time contributions. He carefully details descriptions of the German "Enigma" coding machine, coding theory, and the code breaking process. Having no significant background in mathematics or ciphering, the reader could probably build his or her own Enigma machine based solely on Hodge's lucid descriptions.

Unfortunately, Part 2 does more to promote Hodges' own agenda than it does to illuminate Turing's life. Hodges makes his agenda clear for Turing's biography following the Postscript in a section labeled "Author's Note from the 1983 Edition." In this, Hodges explains that he discovered Turing for himself while preparing a pamphlet critical of the current medical model of homosexuality as member of London's Gay Liberation Front (535). Part 2 of this biography clearly serves as a platform for that purpose.

While generally dull, Part 2 did offer a few surprises. Though not stated explicitly, Hodges' illustrations demonstrate that the premise behind "Clockwork Orange" finds its roots in the state of England's psychiatric medicine in the 1950's. Imprisonment, castration, hormone therapy, operant conditioning, and psychiatric treatment all played a part in the West's attempts to understand and cope with the nature of homosexuality and the male homosexual's role in society.

Since Turing himself did not crusade for gay rights or take any interest in the rather well known intellectual gay communities of the time, the author's agenda appears significantly out of place. Though persecuted, prosecuted, convicted, and "treated," Turing simply wished to be left alone to pursue his various interests. Hodges should have done the same. Yes, details of Turing's relationships, lifestyle, arrest, trial, and treatment belong in a biography along with their historical context, but Hodges frequently departs with obscure references and musings many readers might not understand and which were simply not part of Turing's own experience.

This biography also left me craving more details regarding the links between Turing's early work and his later work as well as for more details specifically about his later work. I don't think Turing simply changed fields of interest mid career. After all, buried within the mechanics of nature lie the seeds of non-artificial intelligence. What better way to recreate that intelligence artificially than by mastering and modeling the original?

I recommend special treatment for this biography. Rather than bullying your way through every page, simply start reading from the beginning, stop when you lose interest, and don't feel guilty about putting it down incomplete.

Rating:
Summary: Turing Explained - Turing Hijacked
Review: Alan Turing makes an absolutely fascinating subject for biography. Not only did Turing significantly contributed to the allied victory in World War II, but one may also consider him to be the father of the modern "thinking machine." Indeed, most introductory computer textbooks still contain references to the "Turing test" for artificial intelligence.

In Part 1, Hodges writes a riveting account of Turing's youth, scientific pursuits, and war-time contributions. He carefully details descriptions of the German "Enigma" coding machine, coding theory, and the code breaking process. Having no significant background in mathematics or ciphering, the reader could probably build his or her own Enigma machine based solely on Hodge's lucid descriptions.

Unfortunately, Part 2 does more to promote Hodges' own agenda than it does to illuminate Turing's life. Hodges makes his agenda clear for Turing's biography following the Postscript in a section labeled "Author's Note from the 1983 Edition." In this, Hodges explains that he discovered Turing for himself while preparing a pamphlet critical of the current medical model of homosexuality as member of London's Gay Liberation Front (535). Part 2 of this biography clearly serves as a platform for that purpose.

While generally dull, Part 2 did offer a few surprises. Though not stated explicitly, Hodges' illustrations demonstrate that the premise behind "Clockwork Orange" finds its roots in the state of England's psychiatric medicine in the 1950's. Imprisonment, castration, hormone therapy, operant conditioning, and psychiatric treatment all played a part in the West's attempts to understand and cope with the nature of homosexuality and the male homosexual's role in society.

Since Turing himself did not crusade for gay rights or take any interest in the rather well known intellectual gay communities of the time, the author's agenda appears significantly out of place. Though persecuted, prosecuted, convicted, and "treated," Turing simply wished to be left alone to pursue his various interests. Hodges should have done the same. Yes, details of Turing's relationships, lifestyle, arrest, trial, and treatment belong in a biography along with their historical context, but Hodges frequently departs with obscure references and musings many readers might not understand and which were simply not part of Turing's own experience.

This biography also left me craving more details regarding the links between Turing's early work and his later work as well as for more details specifically about his later work. I don't think Turing simply changed fields of interest mid career. After all, buried within the mechanics of nature lie the seeds of non-artificial intelligence. What better way to recreate that intelligence artificially than by mastering and modeling the original?

I recommend special treatment for this biography. Rather than bullying your way through every page, simply start reading from the beginning, stop when you lose interest, and don't feel guilty about putting it down incomplete.

Rating:
Summary: Too clever for his own good
Review: Alan Turing will never really be accepted as the genius that he was or as a cruel victim of state incompetence, betrayal and deceit. In a country that could be at ease with such curious oxymorons such as military music, common-wealth and unwritten constitution it is perhaps difficult to see why Alan Turing was not better appreciated and his vast talent not profitably used, both in times of war and, perhaps as importantly, in times of peace.

The book itself should go down in history as a monumental mark of respect and admiration for one of Englands greatest scientific genius. It traces Alan Turing's life from end to end, covering all aspects of his life, his work and his person. It describes his greates contributions to the advancement of science as well as his open and unapologetic homosexuality.

As has been mentioned elsewhere, Alan Turing was one of the first victims of the "security state", an awful waste of fine talent and genius, very much the anglo-saxon way - too damn clever for his own good!

regards,

[e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: An even more beautiful mind
Review: Andrew Hodges writes an exquisite and richly detailed account of the life of Alan Turing. At long last, many of the disperate details of Turing's life and work are brought together seemlessly and the reader finishes the book with a more complete understanding of the accomplishments and challenges Turing faced.

The contrast of Turing's life against the back-drop of early 20th century English society is fascinating, though at times quite painful to read. Turing is portrayed not as a freakish social misfit but as a multi-dimensional person with genius-like abilities. Turing was indeed an odd man, certainly an eccentric intellectual, but Hodges successfully portrays him as an anachronism, a man out of place in his time. That he ended up commiting suicide at a relatively young age punctuates the theme of adversity that define Turing's life.

A fascinating book which richly weaves the history of science, mathematics and English society through the 1920's, 30's and 40's.

Rating:
Summary: Back in print!
Review: Few people outside computer science know how important Alan Turing really is - he just might be the most important person to have lived in the 20th century - and it is quite shocking that this is the only biography of him (other than one written by his mother) that there is. Even more shocking is that in this age that is absolutely Turing's, that his biography could go out of print! I know it will never happen again.

This book is a work of 1st class scholarship, and obvious love. The world is a better place because of it.

Rating:
Summary: Too much detail for me
Review: I found the story of Alan Turing's life to be very interesting. His original work on dreaming up a "thinking machine" that would eventually become what we know as a computer and his work on breaking the German "enigma" code are worth knowing about. His tragic end is cause for us all to remember the importance of tolerance. However, I found this book to be too long and detailed for my tastes. I think the story could have been told in one half or one third the space. So I would recommend that anyone interested in the history of science read a biography of Turing, but a different one than this book.

Rating:
Summary: A scientifically useful biography
Review: I read part of this book in 1985 while trying to understand chaotic orbits. The problem was to understand how an orbit can be deterministic and apparently random. When I read Hodges' description of the Turing machine then I realized that it is easy to answer the question, and was able to write down the answer: one simply digitizes the map or ode, initial condition, and all the control parameters in some base of arithmetic, and then studies the action of a (digitized) positive Liapunov exponent on a digit string. I can't comment on the rest of the book, but Hodges does a very good job of presenting Turing's ideas of computable numbers and computable functions. When my collaborator Palmore read the description I refer to here, he said that he nearly fell out of his chair. We solved the problem of computability of chaotic orbits in that era together.

Is there a good book on computability and automata? So far, all the automata texts that I'm aware of are written in a special holy language of abstract computerize. The language erects an unnecessary barrier to understanding the basic ideas. Is Turing's original paper a proof, or an explanation of what he'd understood? I don't know, but I can refer the reader to "Descartes' Dream" by Reuben and Hersch for perespective.

Rating:
Summary: Good biography, perhaps too long.
Review: If you consider to read this book in order to know about Alan Turing's life, definetely this is the book. In it you will learn about the code breakers, about the WWII spy technology and also about the science aplied to War, however, when I read it I found out that sometimes too many pages (550) can make it boring (more than 20 pages dedicate about how to build a subroutine in a program, more than 20 pages about homosexuality laws, more than 20 pages about historic information from India). Being so detailed makes sometimes forget about the main issue. That is why I didn't give it 5 stars.

Rating:
Summary: The Classic Biography of the Computer's Progenitor
Review: It is a pleasure to see that the wonderful biography of Alan Turing by Andrew Hodges is once again available. With loving care, Hodges follows Turing's life from the clumsy child whose largely absentee parents were caught up in maintaining the British imperial presence in India, to the mathematically precocious adolescent facing teachers for whom mathematics imparted a bad smell to a room, finally coming into his own at Cambridge University where he wrote the paper that provided the conceptual underpinnings of the all-purpose computers we all use today. Hodges carefully explains Turing's crucial contributions to breaking the secret codes that the German military used all through the Second World War, confident in the security provided by their "Enigma" machines. Turing's highly successful war-time practical work known only to a few, his efforts after the war to enable the construction of a general purpose electronic computer were frustrated by bureaucratic mismanagement and by a lack of appreciation of the value of his ideas, many of which came to the fore much later. A burglary of his house that a prudent man would have kept to himself, led to Turing's homosexuality coming to official notice when he reported the crime to the police. He was prosecuted for "gross indecency" and sentenced to a course of injections of estrogen intended to diminish his sex drive. We will never know how much this barbaric treatment contributed to his suicide or what he might have accomplished had his life not been cut short. This is a book that will fascinate readers interested in the history of the computer, in the story of how the German submarine fleet threatening to strangle England was defeated, and in the tragic story of the persecution for his sex life of a man who should have been prized as a national hero.

Rating:
Summary: Definitive biography of an uncommonly interesting subject
Review: One could make the case that Alan Turing was neglected by the historians of science because much of his most important work was kept secret. One could also make the case that Turing's relatively open homosexuality, culminating in conflict with the law, led to some reluctance among biographers. There would be some truth to either claim, but it seems to me that the main reason why Turing has been ill treated by historians is simply that he was a half-century ahead of his time, and that only now is the significance of his work becoming generally understood.

The turning point in the greatly increased apprecation for Turning was the publication of this biography by Hodges, originally in 1983. Lapsing out of print until recently, it would be no exaggeration to say that this book sparked a widespread reappraisal of Turing in an age more able to understand him, both professionally and personally. (It would be difficult, for example, to cite any other scientific biography which inspired a play that was performed in London and on Broadway in New York: "Breaking the Code," written by Hugh Whitemore in 1988, and which was made into a 1997 television play that is available on VHS.) It is difficult to imagine that this biography will be allowed to go out of print again.

Turing's key contribution to computer science was in realizing that computers are not merely number crunchers, but were capable of manipulating general purpose symbols. Certainly, it is natural to represent numbers with symbols inside computing machines, especially because there is such a universally accepted habit of working number symbols with pen and paper. In achieving this critical insight that the symbols inside computers are perfectly general, Turing tied computer science into a large body of traditional work in mathematics reaching back centuries to the work of Leibniz and encompassing the more recent work of such logicians as Boole, Frege, Russell, and Godel. Less widely understood is that it is this same general purpose representational characteristic of computers which has made possible the applications of computers which matter to people, from e-mail and the web to digital music and the little box that decides whether to deploy the airbag in your car.

Contemporaries of Turing tended to see the computer as a sort of automatic adding machine, suitable for calculating ballistics tables and little else. Yet Turing had completed most of the underpinning for his Theory of Computation before the onset of the Second World War, when he was called upon to build a secret computer for cryptanalytic purposes. The very fact that Turing wondered how to decide if a machine could be said to "think," which was the subject of his famous "Turing Test," was itself a revolutionary idea, the question being more significant at the time than any answer.

To a large extent, the ideas first articulated by Turing, regardless of how directly or indirectly their influence has been felt, are at the root of a changed perception of the world which we now all share at the beginning of the 21st Century. This view of the world as a kind of computer has replaced the industrial era view of the world as a kind of clockwork machine. We are all, in effect, on a quest to find out which propositions are "computable" and "decidable."

Combined with this substantial reassessment of Turing's professional contributions, there has been an enormous change in the way British and American society have come to perceive homosexuality. Viewed as a psychological disease and a criminal act at the time of Turing's difficulties with the law, Britain would decriminalize private consensual homosexual relations a few years after his death and begin recognizing a civil liberties interest emerging at about the time of the initial publication of Hodges' book. This gulf of decades has come to reinforce a view of Turing as a man very much outside of his own time, almost constitutionally incapable of thinking as convention would dictate about anything at all.

It is a great irony that the Allied war effort -- and perhaps the Cold War effort -- could not abide a man whom it viewed as a security risk, despite the undeniable fact that his work at a minimum saved a great many lives and quite probably shortened the war. Indeed, it is a great tragedy that the democratic state he helped to save then turned and ungratefully persecuted him, likely driving him to his death.

Few scientific biographies possess the massive sweep of human drama in the crucible of history, and few biographical subjects warrant such treatment. Turing and his definitive biography by Hodges are emphatic exceptions.