A very curious genius

Alan Turing was the greatest computer scientist ever born in Britain. In one stroke he defined the criteria by which the Nazi’s “impossible” Enigma code could be broken and laid the foundations of modern computing. He was a hero.

He was also gay. He was prosecuted for it, punished with chemical castration and took his own life, aged 41.

 

Okay, I’m not a mathematician, my computer science skills could dance on the point of a very sharp pin. But when I read this encomium, ostensibly penned by the Greatest Living Englishman, the ubiquitous mediagogue and technophage Stephen Fry, I blinked. “In one stroke”?

Fry has lent his considerable weight to a campaign to have forty-nine thousand men convicted of illegal homosexual acts up to 1967 pardoned, as indeed Turing was posthumously pardoned by the Queen in 2013. Come one, come all, you might say. The latest phase in Fry’s campaign is to send me an email through the online petitioning webthing, Change dot org, from which the above text is extracted, soliciting a matey signature.

I personally recoiled when I read it, as it is only partly true and not entirely honest: a Ladybird Book version of Turing’s life and tragic death. (For further comment on which see Comments, below.) How were either his brilliance or his premature death connected with his sexuality? He is certainly up there reputationally as a scientist and mathematician with Russell, Hawking and Penrose, but I doubt he would have been keen to be represented as a gay icon.

Turing’s downfall parallels that of another much misrepresented gay icon, Oscar Wilde, whose personality was also rather more subtle than is suggested by his predatory activities. Father-of-two, Wilde was forced in court to admit to homosexual acts while prosecuting a doomed libel action against the Marquess of Queensberry, the irascible parent of his sometime lover and later accomplice in pederasty, Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas.

Turing got similarly caught out when he reported a burglary to the police, and was forced to confess his relationship with his live-in lover, a rough boy twenty years his junior, who admitted to being the burglar’s accomplice (and was not prosecuted). Turing pleaded guilty in the hope of avoiding a prison sentence, but his security clearance was revoked, significantly affecting his subsequent career prospects.

But it is surely disingenuous to imply that Turing was ‘punished’ with chemical castration, and that it caused his suicide two years later, in 1954. The courts had no power to order medical treatment of convicted homosexual men: the mandatory two-year sentence could, however, be mitigated by agreeing to a voluntary course of oestrogen hormone therapy – a completely ineffective measure, since homosexuality is neither a medical condition nor a cross-gender problem – which substantially reduced the patient’s sexual drive, in Turing’s case rendering him impotent.

Ignorant and misguided though this medical intervention was, I’m not sure that at the time it would have been seen as a punishment. I imagine the authorities probably thought it was helping some tragic people to avoid going to gaol and to lead happier and more fulfilled lives, free of a terrible curse.

There is still disagreement over whether Turing’s death by cyanide poisoning was suicide or an accident, since the half-eaten apple found next to his bed was never tested for cyanide, while in his room was some apparatus using cyanide gas in an electroplating experiment (cf Wikipedia). Colleagues asserted that he had borne the unpleasant treatment cheerfully and with good humour. He was no longer on the medication and there was seemingly no reason for him to take his own life.

If indeed he did so, might it not have been for rather rather more convoluted reasons to do with his lifestyle and inner emotions, than merely because the balance of his mind had been chemically altered by a repressive homophobic establishment? It’s a rather political view.

Turing had in fact been honoured by the state, being awarded the OBE by King George in 1945. So heavily classified was his work on codebreaking at Bletchley Park, however, that it prevented him from gaining wider recognition, or doing much more development work on computers after the war, although his pioneering work on secure encryption technology was seminal in the later development of digital communications. He was not involved with building Colossus, by agreement the world’s first electronic computer. He did not ‘invent’ the computer.

He was indeed a peculiarly British genius, obsessive-compulsive and ‘odd’. Besides everything else, he was a near-Olympic class long-distance runner. Undoubtedly brilliant – he famously went head-to-head with Wittgenstein over the nature of mathematics – several of his early academic papers appear to have either built on the work of others, or been published without him realising his discoveries in the fields of calculation and pattern-recognition had already been published at least in part in other countries. (In order for him to ‘break’ the German codes, of course, the Germans had had to invent the method before him…)

Aside from his important insights into the mathematics of cryptography, Turing’s principal contribution to breaking the Enigma code was the development of the ‘bombe’, a device that eliminated possibly irrelevant combinations of the rotating wheels of the Enigma machine, leaving only a few ‘suspects’ to be investigated by the codebreakers. The bombe had first been invented by a Polish cryptanalytical team (Poland’s substantial contributions to the breaking of the Enigma code having scarcely been recognised since the war). Turing’s success was in hardening the design, to the extent that when the Germans realised Enigma had been broken and changed their method, Turing’s ‘bombe’ was already ahead of them. (I hope I have got that right. I too can be guilty of oversimplification.)

While I am absolutely not competent to judge Turing’s scientific importance, then, I beg only to point out that a politicised, ‘right-on’ view of this highly complex individual, his career and his relationship to the state masks a much more nuanced and certainly more interesting history than is implied by ‘He was a hero’. It’s a much overused description nowadays, associated with the modern fashion for emotive hyperbole. (At least his achievements are not described as ‘awesome’…) One wonders, too, what place the history of computing will accord to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, British inventor of the worldwide web, upon which Stephen Fry is relying to mount his campaign.

Turing himself would no doubt protest that his work at Bletchley Park was very much a team effort, and that others were equally involved in developing the associated technology that eventually led to the programmable computer, which astonishingly was first proposed by the mathematician Charles Babbage in 1812.

Babbage’s extraordinary life in many respects mirrors that of Turing: he successfully broke the Russian army codes during the Crimean war, but for reasons of secrecy never received the credit. His 1832 Difference Engine, if completed (he fell out with his backers), would have been the first mathematical calculator. The even more remarkable Analytical Engine was again not constructed in his lifetime, or even in the C20th, but was the first design of a programmable computer (and has been shown to work). Equally OCD, Babbage first proposed the mathematics underlying the creation of our modern postal service, and once published a paper calculating the likely distribution of broken windows in factories… because he was annoyed by them!

Anyway, I’m not sure I want to sign Fry’s petition. Miserable though life was made for them before the 1967 Wolfenden reforms, those men knew the law and the risks they felt compelled to run. Turing’s pardon should stand as a symbolic gesture for all the others. I’m not keen on retrospectivity as a legal principle, either for prosecuting ancient misdemeanours or for pardoning them. I don’t trust gesture politics, special pleading.

A statute of limitations is a mark of a civilised society, recognising that times change, people move on. We could have one of those: a ‘Turing Limit’. Instead, in this age of completely unfettered, universally accessible, graphic TV and internet pornography, we seem to have developed a Puritanical obsession with punishing pretty well everyone who has ever had actual physical needs, sexual urges. In fifty years’ time, will another Stephen Fry be petitioning to have Rolf Harris and all the other old gropers posthumously pardoned?

The apostophe in Nazi’s is incorrectly placed, btw, Stephen.