Alan Turing Year | |
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Abbreviation | ATY |
Discipline | Artificial intelligence Cognitive science Computer science Computing Cryptography Developmental biology Mathematics Philosophy of mind Psychology |
Publication details | |
Publisher | Turing Centenary Advisory Committee |
History | 2012 |
The Alan Turing Year, 2012, marked the celebration of the life and scientific influence of Alan Turing during the centenary of his birth on 23 June 1912. Turing had an important influence on computing, computer science, artificial intelligence, developmental biology, and the mathematical theory of computability and made important contributions to code-breaking during the Second World War. The Alan Turing Centenary Advisory committee (TCAC) was originally set up by Professor Barry Cooper [1]
The international impact of Turing's work is reflected in the list of countries in which Alan Turing Year was celebrated, including: Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, China, Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S.A. 41+ countries were involved.
A number of major events took place throughout the year. Some of these were linked to places with special significance in Turing's life, such as Cambridge University, the University of Manchester, Bletchley Park, Princeton University. The ACM was involved from June to September 2012. Twelve museums were involved including in Germany and Brazil. Artists, musicians and poets took part in the celebrations internationally.
Events included the 2012 Computability in Europe conference, as well as Turing Centenary activities organized or sponsored by the British Computer Society, the Association for Symbolic Logic, British Colloquium for Theoretical Computer Science, the British Society for the History of Mathematics, the Association for Computing Machinery, British Logic Colloquium, Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour, the Computer Conservation Society, the Computer Society of India, the Bletchley Park Trust, the European Association for Computer Science Logic, the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science, International Association for Computing and Philosophy, the Department of Philosophy at De La Salle University-Manila, the John Templeton Foundation, the Kurt Gödel Society, the IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, the Science Museum, and Turing100in2012. [2] The Alan Turing Centenary Conference was held at the University of Manchester during June 2012.
Alan Turing Year is known on Twitter as Alan Turing Years. @alanturingyear.
The Turing Year was coordinated by the Turing Centenary Advisory Committee (TCAC), representing a range of expertise and organisational involvement in the 2012 celebrations. Members of TCAC include Honorary President, Sir John Dermot Turing; The Chair and founder of the committee, mathematician and author of Alan Turing - His Work and Impact S. Barry Cooper; Turing's biographer Andrew Hodges; [3] Wendy Hall, first person from outside North America elected President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in July 2008; Simon Singh; [4] Hugh Loebner sponsor of the Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence (annual science contest based on the famous Turing test) cyberneticist Kevin Warwick, author of 'March of the Machines' and 'I, Cyborg', and committee member Daniela Derbyshire, who is also handling international co-ordination of marketing and publicity.
Examples include:
Alan Mathison Turing was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. He is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.
Bletchley Park is an English country house and estate in Bletchley, Milton Keynes (Buckinghamshire) that became the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War. The mansion was constructed during the years following 1883 for the financier and politician Herbert Leon in the Victorian Gothic, Tudor and Dutch Baroque styles, on the site of older buildings of the same name.
Maxwell Herman Alexander Newman, FRS,, generally known as Max Newman, was a British mathematician and codebreaker. His work in World War II led to the construction of Colossus, the world's first operational, programmable electronic computer, and he established the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory at the University of Manchester, which produced the world's first working, stored-program electronic computer in 1948, the Manchester Baby.
The Loebner Prize was an annual competition in artificial intelligence that awarded prizes to the computer programs considered by the judges to be the most human-like. The prize is reported as defunct since 2020. The format of the competition was that of a standard Turing test. In each round, a human judge simultaneously held textual conversations with a computer program and a human being via computer. Based upon the responses, the judge would attempt to determine which was which.
Irving John Good was a British mathematician who worked as a cryptologist at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing. After the Second World War, Good continued to work with Turing on the design of computers and Bayesian statistics at the University of Manchester. Good moved to the United States where he was professor at Virginia Tech.
The Alan Turing Memorial, situated in Sackville Gardens in Manchester, England, is a sculpture in memory of Alan Turing, a pioneer of modern computing.
Commander Alexander "Alastair" Guthrie Denniston was a Scottish codebreaker in Room 40, deputy head of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) and hockey player. Denniston was appointed operational head of GC&CS in 1919 and remained so until February 1942.
S. Barry Cooper was an English mathematician and computability theorist. He was a professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Leeds.
Brian John Copeland is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, and author of books on the computing pioneer Alan Turing.
Rolf Noskwith was a British businessman who during the Second World War worked under Alan Turing as a cryptographer at the Bletchley Park British military base.
John Harper is a retired computer engineer. He led a Computer Conservation Society/Bletchley Park team that rebuilt a working World War II electromechanical Bombe decryption device.
Codebreaker, also known as Britain's Greatest Codebreaker, is a 2011 television docudrama aired on Channel 4 about the life of Alan Turing. The film had a limited release in the U.S. beginning on 17 October 2012. The story is told as a discussion between Alan Turing and his psychiatrist Dr. Franz Greenbaum. The story is based on journals maintained by Dr. Franz Greenbaum and others who have studied the life of Alan Turing and also some of his colleagues.
About 7,500 women worked in Bletchley Park, the central site for British cryptanalysts during World War II. Women constituted roughly 75% of the workforce there. While women were overwhelmingly under-represented in high-level work such as cryptanalysis, they were employed in large numbers in other important areas, including as operators of cryptographic and communications machinery, translators of Axis documents, traffic analysts, clerical workers, and more. Women made up the majority of Bletchley Park’s workforce, most enlisted in the Women’s Royal Naval Service, WRNS, nicknamed the Wrens.
The Turing Guide, written by Jack Copeland, Jonathan Bowen, Mark Sprevak, Robin Wilson, and others and published in 2017, is a book about the work and life of the British mathematician, philosopher, and early computer scientist, Alan Turing (1912–1954).
Bernard Richards is a British computer scientist and an Emeritus Professor of Medical Informatics at the University of Manchester, England.
Sir John Dermot Turing, 12th Baronet is a British solicitor and author.
A statue of Alan Turing, created in slate by Stephen Kettle in 2007, is located at Bletchley Park in England as part of an exhibition that honours Turing (1912–1954). It was commissioned by the American businessman and philanthropist Sidney Frank (1919–2006).
Turochamp is a chess program developed by Alan Turing and David Champernowne in 1948. It was created as part of research by the pair into computer science and machine learning. Turochamp is capable of playing an entire chess game against a human player at a low level of play by calculating all potential moves and all potential player moves in response, as well as some further moves it deems considerable. It then assigns point values to each game state, and selects the move resulting in the highest point value.
Alan Turing was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. He left an extensive legacy in mathematics, science, society and popular culture.
Prof: Alan Turing Decoded is a 2015 biography of Alan Turing, a 20th-century mathematician and computer scientist, authored by his nephew Dermot Turing. Written in a non-academic style, it begins with Turing's family history and early childhood, continuing with his contributions to Britain's cryptanalysis and encryption efforts in World War II and culminating in Turing's conviction for homosexuality and his later suicide.