No Fear!

The movie “The Imitation Game” credits mathematician Alan Turing with ending World War II two years early and saving 14 million lives. So it might seem strange to say it undersells Turing’s legacy. And yet that’s the case.

It’s true that as the movie depicts, Turing gave the Allies an incredible advantage by cracking the German Enigma code. This allowed England and her allies a degree of visibility into their enemy’s plans that present-day spies can only dream of. But a more comprehensive account of Turing’s work tells us something astonishing: Code-breaking was but a sidebar to Turing’s larger ambitions.

Like Newton and Einstein, Turing strove to understand something fundamental about reality itself. And as the inventor of the mathematical abstraction that enabled all subsequent devices we call “computers,” some of his insights are more relevant today than ever.

At the time, a “computer” was literally a person, working with pencil and paper or perhaps a mechanical calculator as an aid. Mathematicians were interested in whether or not this hypothetical computer-person could, starting from a set of axioms, determine whether any statement in the universe was true or false.

Building on the work of others, Turing realized that the way to answer this question was to replace the human with a “universal” mechanical computer. Turing didn’t need to build such a computer; it was enough to describe it mathematically, which he did.

Read more about how all this started here:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-we-neednt-fear-the-machines-1417394021?KEYWORDS=Christopher+Mims

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