Alan Turing, Man and Myth
This fall, Benedict Cumberbatch stars in The Imitation Game as English mathematician Alan Turing. Turing might be best known today for the Turing test, but during World War II, he cracked the Nazi’s “Enigma” code at Britain’s top-secret spy center Bletchley Park, significantly speeding the Allied victory. He also helped invent modern computing, and his innovations underlie the digital world as we know it. But Turing remained silent about his wartime heroics, obeying his oath of secrecy. In the 1950s, he was persecuted for homosexuality, which was then a crime in Britain, and he died under mysterious circumstances.
As late as 2001, the film Enigma left Turing out of the story of the code breakers at Bletchley Park, replacing him with a heterosexual mathematician-hero. But many writers and artists have taken note of the tragic arc of Turing’s story, and he’s appeared as a character in plays, a dozen or more sci-fi novels, a rock opera by the Pet Shop Boys. Lately, Turing is becoming more than a groundbreaking mathematician. He’s becoming an almost mythic figure.
Graham Moore wrote the screenplay for The Imitation Game, and he’s been obsessed with Turing for years. “Among awkward dorky teenagers without friends like myself, Alan Turing was this object of kind of cult-like fasciation,” he says. “He was this like campfire legend — did you know that the man who secretly invented the computer was gay and no one knows because he was persecuted by the government after the war?”
Columbia University astrophysicist Janna Levin wrote a book called A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines. She says Turing’s big insight was that the Enigma code was too complicated any person to decrypt it — but a machine could do it. “He imagined a machine like a typewriter and that machine would read kind of a tape, and the typewriter-like machine becomes hardware and the zeros and ones — the tape that it reads — becomes like the software.” Computers were once known as Universal Turing Machines.
His code breaking was top secret for decades, and he was outed by an ex-lover in 1952 when homosexuality was illegal. He submitted to shots of estrogen as a punishment in lieu of jail. Two years after the trial, he was found dead lying next to an apple laced with cyanide — possibly a reference to Snow White, a favorite fairy tale of Turing’s. The official cause of death was suicide.
David Simpatico and Justine Chen are writing an opera called The Life and Death(s) of Alan Turing, which uses different theories about Turing's death as a framing device to explore his life. We see how his death could have been an accident or a government assassination. His final “death” is the most poetic: Turing uploads his consciousness to a computer. “And the thing about his obsession with Snow White and the apple, part of it was about the witch’s transformation” into an old woman, Simpactico says. “In his eyes she became trans-human because her soul went from one container — the evil queen — into the old hag.” For Simpatico and Chen’s Turing, this transformation represented the idea that the mind wasn’t “imprisoned” by the body, an idea still being championed by futurists like Ray Kurzweil. “You could put that soul and your mind and your essence in other containers,” Simpatico says.
Uploading your mind to a computer, artificial intelligence — Turing’s thinking is still cutting edge. He was a government insider privy to the secrets of power, but also an outside and maverick, and that contradiction still defines how the tech industry sees itself.
