Alan Turing Centenary Lecture

Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age

Jack Copeland
University of Cantebury, New Zealand

At the turn of the millennium Time magazine listed Alan Turing among the twentieth century's 100 greatest minds, alongside the Wright brothers, Albert Einstein, DNA busters Crick and Watson, and the discoverer of penicillin, Alexander Fleming. Turing's achievements during his short life of 42 years were legion. Best known as the genius who broke some of Germany's most secret codes during the war of 1939-45, Turing was also the father of the modern computer. Today, all who click or touch to open are familiar with the impact of his ideas. To Turing we owe the brilliant innovation of storing applications, and the other programs necessary for computers to do our bidding, inside the computer's memory, ready to be opened when we wish. We take for granted that we use the same slab of hardware to shop, manage our finances, type our memoirs, play our favourite music and videos, and send instant messages across the street or around the world. Like many great ideas this one now seems as obvious as the cart and the arch, but with this single invention--the stored-program universal computer--Turing changed the world.

Turing was a theoretician's theoretician, yet like Leonardo da Vinci and Isaac Newton before him he also had immensely practical interests. In 1945 he designed a vast stored-program electronic computer called the Automatic Computing Engine, or ACE. Turing's sophisticated ACE design achieved commercial success as the English Electric Company's DEUCE, one of the earliest electronic computers to go on the market. In those days--the first eye-blink of the Information Ag--the new machines sold at a rate of no more than a dozen or so a year. But in less than four decades, Turing's ideas transported us from an era where 'computer' was the term for a human clerk who did the sums in the back office of an insurance company or science lab, into a world where many have never known life without the Internet.

'Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age' is an introduction to Turing and his ideas, from the universal computing machine of 1936 through Bletchley Park and the ACE to his famous 1950 article 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence'.

About the Alan Turing Year:

2012 has been designed worldwide as a celebration of Alan Turing's 100th birthday. The links below will give some context for further exploration of Turing's contributions.

• Turing Centenary Events and Information
• Alan Turing (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
• Alan Turing - Andrew Hodges
• Alan Turing Archive - Jack Copeland
• On-line Gallery of Alan Turing Year Art

Non-Stanford Visitors:

Visitors are welcome at the live talk. The Colloquium meets in Skilling Auditorium on the Stanford Campus. For a map showing the location of Skilling Auditorium and recommended parking, CLICK HERE. Parking is free and unrestricted in most on-campus lots after 4PM.

Video:

This talk can be viewed live on the Internet at http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/live/ee380.asx on May 2nd between 4:15PM and 5:30PM Pacific time.

The archived video can be accessed following the presentation at http://ee380.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/videologger.php?target=1200502-ee380-300.asx.

Slides:

There is no downloadable version of the slides for this talk available at this time.

About the speaker:

Jack Copeland FRS NZ is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, where he is Director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing. This year he is Royden B. Davis Visiting Chair of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Department of Psychology at Georgetown University, Washington DC. His books include The Essential Turing (Oxford University Press), Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park’s Codebreaking Computers (Oxford University Press), Alan Turing’s Electronic Brain (Oxford University Press), Logic and Reality (Oxford University Press), and Artificial Intelligence (Blackwell); and he has published more than 100 articles on the philosophy and history of computing, and mathematical and philosophical logic.

He is recognised as a leading authority on Turing's work, and in June of 2004, the 50th anniversary of Turing’s death, he delivered the first annual Turing Memorial Lecture at Bletchley Park National Museum and lectured on Turing’s life and work at the Royal Institution of London. He received the Scientific American Sci/Tech Web Award for his on-line archive www.AlanTuring.net. A Londoner by birth, he earned a B.Phil. with Distinction from the University of Oxford followed by a D.Phil. in mathematical logic in 1979. At Oxford he was taught by Turing's student and friend Robin Gandy. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of California at Los Angeles, a visiting professor at the universities of Sydney, Aarhus, Melbourne, and Portsmouth, and a senior fellow of the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a past president of the U.S.-based Society for Machines and Mentality and is the founding editor of the Rutherford Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology.

Contact information:

Jack Copeland