Remembering

On Remembrance Sunday, we take a little time to remember the people who have sacrificed their lives in conflicts around the world. There are many people who have had a significant impact on our lives and yet about whom we know very little and I was reminded of this recently whilst posting a link to this blog. Before the website allowed me to post the link, it brought up a box containing some words written in very wobbly and indistinct text and asked me to type in what the words were. You’ve probably come across the same thing any number of times on your travels around the internet.

This is known as a CAPTCHA, which is a contrived acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. It’s a quick and easy way of ensuring that the person about to post the link or comment on the blog is a real person and not a computer, which may be trying to spam the site.

The Turing Test was first posited by Alan Turing, the British mathematician and computer scientist during the 1950s. Turing is one of the fathers of the machine you’re using right now and foresaw a time when computers would be able to think for themselves. The Turing Test was to establish whether a human being would be able to tell whether he or she was conversing with another human being or with a soulless computer.

Turing was a brilliant man and contributed significantly to the British war effort through his work as a code-breaker at Bletchley Park; having mastered mathematics, cryptanalysis and logic, Turing successfully turned his hand to chemistry towards the end of his life. But the end of his life came too soon and he died at the age of 41, apparently of suicide. It is believed that Turing first laced with cyanide, and then ate, an apple – urban myth holds that this is where Apple computers got their logo, although the company denies this.

Turing, you see, was gay and British society at that time was bigoted and intolerant: he was convicted of “gross indecency” and forced to take female hormones to chemically castrate him – as a result, he grew breasts. Recently, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologised to Turing, praising his contribution to the war effort and stating “on behalf of the British Government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.”

The Turing Test is a test of humanity. When it came to Turing himself, society failed that test 50 years ago. With this apology, I’d like to believe we’ve finally passed it but there is still bigotry and intolerance in workplaces and society in general: remember that each time you take the Turing Test.