Alan Turing Prize Draw

As part of our Turing For The Tenner campaign CMS are giving you the chance to win a limited edition Turing For The Tenner t-shirt.

Wearing these high quality t-shirts means you can show your support by raising awareness for this great cause, it’s also incredibly stylish too!

To be in with a chance of winning one of these fantastic t-shirts simply Like our Facebook competition post or re-tweet our competition post on twitter.

We will then select winners at random and the lucky winners will be notified.

Please remember what the cause is for and if you haven’t already please sign the petition.

Thanks and Good Luck!

Make Alan Turing the face of the new £10 note

Alan Turing is widely considered as the father of modern computer science. His contributions to the world are still felt to this day. Turing’s work in Artificial Intelligence and binary computing were ground breaking and are the platform on which computing as we know it today are built on.

During the war Turing helped crack the German's Enigma and Lorenz machines which were used to transmit encrypted messages between German Headquarters and deployed U-boats. His efforts helped a great deal in winning the war and saved millions of lives. This petition is a way of commemorating Turing’s work by putting his face (quite rightly) on the new £10 note.

Thomas Thurman, who set up the petition, wrote: "Alan Turing is a national hero. His contribution to computer science, and hence to the life of the nation and the world, is incalculable." The ripple-effect of his theories on modern life continues to grow, and may never stop. The current Bank of England £10 notes are Series E, but Series F notes are already in circulation for some denominations. "We therefore call upon the Treasury to request the Bank of England to consider depicting Alan Turing when Series F £10 banknotes are designed."

We need as many signatures as possible to make this happen so please sign the petition.

In the Beginning

Alan Turing is widely known as the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. Alan Turing’s mathematical talents were evident to his parents and educators at an early age. Turing was born in London in 1912, to Julius and Ethel Turing. He attended St. Michael’s until the age of 13 when he was then enrolled in Sherborne School in Dorset. While at Sherborne, Turing excelled in mathematics and is known to have extrapolated on Einstein’s questioning of Newton’s laws of motion during this period. Turing’s close friend Christopher Morcom died during this time, and his death provided inspiration to Turing and his study of artificial intelligence.

School Life

Turing graduated with first-class honours from King’s College, Cambridge in 1934, and in 1935 he was elected a fellow due to the strength of his dissertation on the central limit theorem. In 1936, Turing submitted his famous paper, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungs problem”. In this paper Turing reformulated Kurt Godel’s findings and replaced them with the devices known as the Turing Machines. Turing held that such machines would be able to perform any mathematical computations as long as they were represented as algorithms. Turing proved that using such a machine would prove that the Entscheidungs problem had no solution.

During the period of 1936-1938, Turing studied cryptology in addition to mathematics. Turing received his PhD from Princeton University and his dissertation was entitled “Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals”. In this work Turing introduced the idea that if Turing Machines were augmented with oracles, the combination would allow the study of problems deemed unsolvable by the Turing Machines.

Decrypting the Germans

Turing returned to Cambridge and studied at the Government Code and Cypher School, and during World War II, Turing became a leading expert in breaking German ciphers. Turing concentrated on Cryptanalysis of the Enigma with Dilly Knox, and together, using crib-based decryption they produced the initial functional specification of the bombe. This advance in cryptology was the first of many provided by Turing, his work was critical to the war effort and he was later awarded the OBE.

The Turing Test

Turing moved to Richmond, London in 1945 where he continued to work on the Automatic Computing Engine at the National Physical Laboratory. Turing presented a paper on the detailed design of a stored-program computer and using this, the Pilot ACE was created though at the time Turing was on sabbatical at Cambridge. Turing was then appointed Deputy Director of the Computing Laboratory at the University of Manchester in 1949. There he wrote “Computing machinery and intelligence” and in it he addressed the problem of artificial intelligence and proposed a test, now known as the Turing Test, which was an attempt to define a standard for an “intelligent” machine.

Turing in Biology

From 1952 to his death in 1954, Alan Turing worked on mathematical biology and more specifically, morphogenesis. In his paper “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis”, Turing put forth his hypothesis of pattern formation. Here he was attempting to understand Fibonacci phyllotaxis and Fibonacci numbers in relation to plant structures.

Private Life

In 1952, Turing met Arnold Murray, the pair met regularly and Murray often slept at Turing’s home. Murray was later convicted of being an accomplice to a break in of Turing’s home. However, this was a minor charge as they were both then convicted of gross indecency under the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 which outlawed homosexual acts in the UK. Turing was then faced with the choice of incarceration or hormonal treatment. He chose the latter and this choice severely altered his physical appearance and health and later affected his mind. Because of his conviction, Turing’s security clearance was revoked and he was barred from the Government Communications Headquarters.

Death of a Genius

Turing Died on June 7, 1954 from cyanide poisoning and the cause of death was determined to be suicide. Turing’s posthumous contributions include the Turing Award which is given each year by the Association for Computing Machinery for technical contributions to the computing community and is considered equivalent to the Nobel Prize.

Public Apology

In 2009 a petition was started urging the British Government to apologize for the conviction of Alan Turing on the grounds of homosexuality. A formal apology was given by Prime Minister Gordon Brown on 10 September 2009.

Turing for the Tenner

The Turing for the tenner campaign has recently been launched by CMS to raise awareness of this great man and to put his face on the front of the £10 note. To sign the petition for this cause please visit here.