Alan Turing The Father of AI

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Alan TuringThe Father of AI?

• 1912-1954
• Turing was a brilliant mathematician, logician
  and one of the first computer scientists
• He is considered to have been one of the foremost
  thinkers in the foundations of Artificial
  Intelligence

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Mathematics at the turn of the last century

• 1900 David Hilbert proposed a famous
  collection of open problems to
  mathematicians
• This was a period of incredible optimism and
  energy in mathematics formalists such as
  Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead were
  attempting to formalise the foundations of
  mathematics

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Hilberts 1920 Programme

• In 1920 Hilbert formulated a programme of
  formalisation of the foundations of mathematics
• He proposed that it should be possible to provide
  a small set of axioms from which all mathematics
  could be derived
• He further proposed that it should be possible
  for mathematics to be reduced to applying a set
  of rules to these axioms to determine whether any
  given proposition is true or false

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Kurt Gödel

• In 1931, a little known Austrian logician
  demonstrated his famous Incompleteness Theorem
  which completely demolished Hilberts hopes
• Any system as powerful as arithmetic must contain
  true propositions that cannot be proved!
• But that still left the Entscheidungsproblem the
  problem of deciding whether a proposition is true
  or not

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Turings Early Career

• Turing studied mathematics at Cambridge 31-34
  and then went on to pursue a doctorate
• In 36 he proved that Hilberts hopes were
  unfounded, by demonstrating the undecidability of
  the Halting Problem
• This showed that there are problems for which no
  computational procedure exists that can solve
  them
• To do this, Turing had to formalise a model of
  computation that is fully general it captures
  all notions of computation
• it is still central to theoretical computer
  science and is now called the Turing Machine

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World War II

• After Hitlers Wermacht smashed
  through France in 1940, Britain stood
  alone against the strongest military
  power the world had ever known
• Throughout the war, Britains lifeline lay in her
  supply lines from the US and her colonies across
  the Atlantic
• Admiral Dönitz led the German U-boat fleet in a
  war of attrition against the British merchant
  navy

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The Battle of the Atlantic

• Key to the U-boat tactics was the coordination by
  wireless
• Each U-boat would have to surface and communicate
  with Germany in order to receive news about the
  British convoys
• They would coordinate their attacks into
  wolf-packs that could hunt down the poorly
  defended ships and sink thousands of tons of
  shipping
• Secure communications were vital to this effort

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Bletchley Park

• In 1939 Turing was recruited to join the
  cryptographers at Bletchley Park, a British
  Intelligence base
• The key work was to break the codes used by the
  German U-boats a code based on the use of the
  Enigma machine

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The Enigma

• The Enigma was a machine devised
  by German cryptographers in the 20s
• It links keys to a series of rotor wheels
  that rotate as keys are typed
• Each key sends an electrical current through a
  wire that is laced through the rotor, connecting
  the input to a different position output
• The sequence of wheels encode the input as an
  output letter, like a substitution cypher, but
  with a dynamic property from the rotation of the
  wheels
• Code books determined the setting for some parts,
  but wheel settings were sent as first part of
  message

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The Enigma
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Code-breakers

• Poles managed to break the
  Enigma before the war, but it
  was changed just after
  Chamberlains abortive peace for
  our time visit to Germany
• However, their efforts were critical in starting
  the Bletchley efforts
• At Bletchley, the earliest computers were devised
  and used in breaking the codes, using search

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The Bombe

• Turing was one of the key designers of the
  machines used to break the code
• A great deal of luck was also required captured
  codebooks from U-boats and foolish communications
  personnel contributed to the effort

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Post-War

• Turing went on to work at the National Physics
  Laboratory, designing one of the first real
  computers ACE
• He also worked at Manchester University as deputy
  director of the computer laboratory
• During this period (45-54) he also produced
  some of the earliest work in AI the Turing Test,
  speculations on Machine Intelligence and a
  chess-playing program

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Turing beyond computing

• Turing had a complex personal life
• He was unfortunate enough to be a homosexual in a
  period when it was illegal
• He was brought to the attention of the police
  after a former lover burgled his home
• He was sentenced to hormone treatment and became
  very depressed, eventually committing suicide by
  eating an apple laced with cyanide

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Alan Turing 1912-1954