A posthumous apology for Alan Turing
Alan Turing, OBE, did a great deal to hasten the end of World War Two through his work at Bletchley Park and the design of the bombe – the machine used to break three- and four- rotor Enigma cyphers. He’s also known for the Turing Test of artificial intelligence – can a machine convince a human, who cannot see it, that it is a human?
He was a brilliant mathematician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist, but he was gay. In 1952, he was prosecuted under the Gross Indecency Act for admitting to having had sex with a man, and killed himself two years later. Rather than go to prison, he accepted probation on condition of being chemically castrated. He also had his security clearance revoked, meaning he couldn’t continue his work with GCHQ.
That decision, both immoral and short-sighted, cost him his life. Quite apart from his contributions to the war effort and mathematical genius, that has to be seen as a terrible crime. John Graham-Cumming, a computer scientist, has set up a petition at the Number Ten website that reads
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to apologize for the prosecution of Alan Turing that led to his untimely death.
I have signed the petition, and very strongly encourage you to do the same at petitions.number10.gov.uk/turing. The notes to the petition read:
Alan Turing was the greatest computer scientist ever born in Britain. He laid the foundations of computing, helped break the Nazi Enigma code and told us how to tell whether a machine could think.
He was also gay. He was prosecuted for being gay, chemically castrated as a ‘cure’, and took his own life, aged 41.
The British Government should apologize to Alan Turing for his treatment and recognize that his work created much of the world we live in and saved us from Nazi Germany. And an apology would recognize the tragic consequences of prejudice that ended this man’s life and career.
I wholeheartedly agree. More information is on the BBC News website.
xD.
