Nearly 50 years before chess champion Garry Kasparov battled IBM’s Deep Blue computer in the ballyhooed man-versus-machine contest of 1996, a British cryptographer and mathematician named Alan Turing was imagining the building blocks of what is now known as artificial intelligence (AI). As early as the 1940s, he predicted that machines one day would play a mean game of chess.
Turing was a World War II code breaker at the famed Government Code and Cypher School at the Bletchley Park house in Buckinghamshire, England. It was the center of Allied code breaking during World War II and a place where team members devised automatic machinery for decryption. Their work culminated in the breaking of the Nazi Enigma code and the development of Colossus, the world’s first programmable digital computer.
While working at Bletchley Park, Turing – now considered by many to be the father of AI – talked about the possibilities of machine intelligence by referencing chess. The game was a source of “challenging and clearly defined problems against which proposed methods for problem solving could be tested,” according to an Encyclopedia Britannica account. Although Turing experimented with chess programs, he had no computer to run them because stored-program digital computers didn’t exist yet.
His musings about a chess-playing computer became public in the 1940s, but the ultimate challenge of man versus machine wasn’t realized until 1996, when Kasparov took on Deep Blue. Kasparov, considered one of history’s greatest chess players, took the initial match by a score of four games to two. However, Deep Blue staged a comeback the following year and won a highly publicized rematch.
July 2019. Members of the public were asked to “think science” and nominate people from the field. Turing was selected from over 200,000 nominations. AFP/GETTY IMAGES
A chagrined Kasparov suggested that Deep Blue had been aided by human assistance, although IBM denied those charges, according to an account from history.com. Kasparov asked for a rematch, but IBM instead retired Deep Blue.
Turing didn’t live to see that battle, but he paved the way for it by turning his focus to intelligent machines after World War II. In 1947, he gave one of the earliest public lectures to mention computer intelligence. “What we want is a machine that can learn from experience,” he said, according to the Britannica account.
The next year, he introduced many of the key pillars of AI in a report titled “Intelligent Machinery.” But he never published the paper, and many of his central concepts later were reinvented by others.
His earlier days didn’t portend a world-class visionary. Andrew Hodges, a mathematician at the Mathematical Institute at Oxford University, wrote the biography “Alan Turing: The Enigma,” which later was turned into a film. In a 2014 interview with PBS, Hodges pointed out several traits that seemed to reflect the opposite of a budding genius. He stuttered when he talked, for example, and performed so poorly in public schools in the 1920s that he frustrated his teachers.
“I can forgive his writing, though it is the worst I have ever seen, and I try to view tolerantly his unswerving inexactitude and slipshod, dirty work,” his English teacher wrote, according to PBS.
Still, he managed to excel at more than science. An avid runner, Turing joined running clubs and won several races. In 1948, according to PBS, his best marathon time was 2 hours, 46 minutes and 3 seconds, which was only 11 minutes slower than the Olympic winning time that year.
The father of the modern computer also dabbled in physics, biology, chemistry and neurology. His most notable work as a computer scientist came in 1936, when he developed the idea for the Universal Turing Machine, which was the basis for the world’s first computer. He also developed a test for AI in 1950, the Turing test, that is still in use today.
One of his more whimsical pursuits was a fascination with daisies, which also led to a major scientific breakthrough. His 1952 work on morphogenesis became a new field of mathematical biology, providing a mathematical explanation for how things grow.
Turing took his own life in 1954 at 41. At the time of his death, the public had no idea what he had contributed to the Allied victory, and many didn’t know how much he advanced computer science and the fledgling field of AI.
“Alan Turing was clearly a man ahead of his time,” reads a June 2012 BBC article. “In 1950, at the dawn of computing, he was already grappling with the question: ‘Can machines think?’”