The Turing Test Allan Turing & GBLTQ Equality By Rev. Dr. Todd F. Eklof June 8, 2014

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1 Allan Turing & GBLTQ Equality By Rev. Dr. Todd F. Eklof June 8, 2014 September 3, 1939, a German U-30 submarine torpedoed what would be the first ship sunk in World War II, the SS Athenia, a British passenger ship, killing 117 people onboard. The U-30 had been constructed and commissioned just four years earlier, as part of the German Navy s rearmament program, Plan Z, even though constructing U-boats was a violation of the Treaty of Versailles (Ver-sy) signed between Germany and the Allied Forces after the First World War. Twenty months later, a U-110, commanded by Captain Fritz-Julius Lemp, the very same commander responsible for sinking the Athenia, was captured by a British destroyer. Although it was badly wrecked and about to sink, a boarding party entered through the sub s damaged conning tower while the rest of the crew rescued survivors from the water. Inside they began frantically looking for anything, especially logs, charts and records that might provide clues about what the Germans were planning. Inside the abandoned control room they discovered an Enigma coding machine, still working and plugged in. A German engineer invented the Enigma for the purpose of enciphering and deciphering secret messages. It looked a lot like an old typewriter, though it was electric and had rotors inside that were rearranged to continually change the meaning of its 26 letters. Without going into complicated detail, the rotors made it possible for each message written by the Enigma to have over 105,000 possible solutions. No wonder both the Germans and the Allies considered the Enigma code impregnable! This is where Alan Turing comes in. He was one of a small number of promising young geniuses brought to the British government s top secret code center in Bletchley Park to help crack the Enigma code. Although conceived while his parents were in Madrid, Alan was born June 23, 1912, in London, just two months after the Titanic went down. Unless you re a history buff, if you ve heard of Alan Turing at all, you ve probably heard of his famous Turing Test, his method for determining when a machine becomes as intelligent as a human. The test itself simply involves a person and a computer out of sight in separate rooms, while an inquisitor outside tries to determine which one is human by examining their written responses. But the method isn t nearly as interesting as Turing s definition of when a machine becomes equal to a human when the inquisitor can no longer tell the difference. In a 1950 article published in Mind, a quarterly on philosophy and psychology, Turing predicted, in about fifty years time it will be possible to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 10 9, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent

2 chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning. 1 Today, nearly 65 years later, computers still don t seem human in their interactions with us, but we re getting closer everyday. In 1996 a computer named Deep Blue beat World Chess Champion Gary Kasparov. In 2011 IBM s Watson played on the quiz show Jeopardy, against a couple of its best players ever, and won, interpreting the questions and coming up with answers in enough time to physically push a button before its human counterparts could, missing only one question that in the end also turned out to be correct. Today, Google has cars that drive themselves with no steering wheels or break pedals. In 1999, during a Stanford conference on Artificial Intelligence, a poll indicated AI experts believed it would take hundreds of years, if ever, before the Turing Test could be passed by a computer. 2 Now, just fifteen years later, they ve changed their tune. In recent months, Google has spent billions purchasing every major and many small robotics and AI companies in existence for what Tech magazine, re/code recently called, a Manhattan Project of AI. Ray Kurzweil, one of the most renowned and controversial scientists alive today, predicts that, by 2045 computers will be a billion times more powerful than all of the human brains on Earth. 3 So Alan Turing got it right. The age of Artificial Intelligence is upon us. Before long we ll be conversing with our computers and cars in the same way we speak to other people. But what you may not know about Alan Turing is that he s actually considered the father of computer science. Without him we might not have computers at all. Turing, while socially awkward, described by many who knew him as weird but likable, demonstrated his mathematical genius from an early age, frustrating his teachers because he easily solved extremely complicated problems by jumping right to the answers without ever seeming to work them out. As an adult he would play chess with another genius friend while they walked, simply naming the moves as they spoke. As a student at Cambridge he became particularly fascinated with a philosophical problem known as the Liar s Paradox, expressed most simply by the statement, I am lying. That statement can t be true, because it is a lie, but if it is a lie, then it must also be true. There is an original Star Trek episode in which Captain Kirk uses the Liar s Paradox to defeat a group of androids by literally blowing their minds when he says, I always tell a lie. But years before computers even existed, Alan Turing, a mathematical visionary, able to solve math problems in his head and make chess moves with his mind, envisioned a machine that might help resolve this very paradox. As biographer David Boyle says, This was the germ of the idea that eventually became a computer. 4 1 Hodges, Andrew, Alan Turing: The Enigma, Vintage, Random House, New York, NY 2012 (1 st published by Princeton University Press, 1983), p Ibid. 4 Boyle, David, Alan Turning: Unlocking the Enigma, Endeavor Press Ltd., UK, 2014, {Kindle version] loc

3 Although he predicted such a machine would only prove mathematically that the Entscheidnugsproblem, or Liars Paradox, could not be solved, his theory answered a bigger question among mathematicians and philosophers at the time, regarding whether or not everything could ultimately be reduced to mathematical terms, including international disagreements, and, thus, be resolved mathematically rather than by hostility and war. I might argue that most wars begin precisely because conflict is treated too much like a math problem, discounting the human factor entirely. Nevertheless, Turing s machine, according to his prediction, answered this philosophical quandary by concluding there are some problems, like the Liar s Paradox, that simply cannot be resolved with math or logic. The paper he wrote on the subject was impressive enough that he was invited to America to study at Princeton, at the same time Albert Einstein was teaching there. Turing s own mentor there, Princeton math professor Alonzo Church was so impressed with the work of his protégé that he coined the term, Turing Machines, in a review he d written in the Journal of Symbolic Logic. Although such machines still didn t exist at the time, they were uniquely based upon a kind of binary code as envisioned by Turing. Today we simply call these Turing Machines, computers. Without going into how the computer evolved from Turing s idea to the reality we all depend upon today, suffice it to say, he is not only the father of AI, but has a very real and powerful presence in the modern world, as well as in most our homes, because he figured out how to do what others though impossible, create a machine that could make thousands of calculations in a short time by using binary code. As if that isn t enough, we also have Turing to thank, in large part, for defeat of Nazi Germany. While at Bletchley Park, it was largely his insight that made it possible to finally crack the Enigma Code. He began, in typical fashion, by visualizing the problem in his head. In the early weeks of the war, Boyle says, he spent his time writing out in an almost illegible longhand a plan for cracking the code, working the whole process logically. 5 What he realized is that it was possible to solve the Engima riddle through reverse engineering and elimination, but to do so they would need a machine that could decipher the difference between what they knew was meaningless information from that which had possibility. So Turing built an electromechanical device he named Victory, that was seven feet long, six feet high, and weighed more than a ton. As Boyle says, It also leaked oil, was constantly getting itself jammed, and gave people electric shocks. 6 Nevertheless, it worked so well that before the war was complete, the British and U.S. governments constructed more than 200 of the machines, known as bombes, for breaking Germany s secret codes. These machines were able to rapidly calculate millions of wrong solutions and to eliminate them from the equation, leaving only a 5 Ibid., loc Ibid., loc

4 few dozen or so possible right answers. Elimination is easier than identification, was the Turing Mantra, and his solution to the Enigma made it possible for the Allies to figure out what the Germans were up to by easily reading the secret code they believed was impenetrable. By the end of the war the Bletchley Park team was deciphering more than 3000 messages a day. Winston Churchill attributed the Bletchley code-breakers with helping to win the war, famously calling them, the geese that laid the golden eggs but never cackled, referring to the silent nature of their successful, though, top secret activities. So there you have it, an individual many of us know little about and a good number have probably never heard of, yet he changed the world, both through his enormous, perhaps pivotal role during WWII, and, as the father of computer science, his contribution to what is perhaps the most important advance in technology since the dawn of human history. The next giant leap forward, furthermore, may very well be the fulfillment of his belief in intelligent machines, in an artificial form of intelligence that is now in its infancy but will soon burst onto the scene faster than you can silence your cellular devices. Perhaps, by now, after all of this, your own computer has cracked the enigma of this Pride Sunday sermon. Yes, Alan Turing was gay, or a homosexual, as it was put back then. But Turing was far ahead of his time. He was far ahead of our own time. As I said, Turing, though likeable, was considered weird by most accounts in his day, not because people suspected him of being gay, but because he was always so oddly out of place in just about everything. Even as a child he was overly shy and unkempt, compounded by a troubling stammer and an obnoxious crowing laugh. While at Bletchley he always wore a mask while riding his bicycle, perhaps because he was asthmatic, and often appeared nervous when just walking around. Once he was even arrested by the local police for appearing suspicious. Upon taking him in they discovered he hadn t signed his identity card, which he explained was because he d taken seriously the rule against writing on them. He was famous for keeping his trousers up with a string instead of a belt, was usually unshaven, and was often found knitting in a corner of the military buildings he worked in. Talk about alarming the officers! He d also joined the Home Guard, a volunteer British defense force, but quit attending training because he got bored. His commander was furious and wanted to have him punished, but when he looked at the question on his application asking, do you understand that by enrolling in the Home Guard you place yourself liable to military law? he saw that Turing had written, No. 7 Perhaps the most peculiar quality he had, however, was the fact that he hardly thought twice about talking openly about his sexuality. Even though homosexuality had been officially outlawed in England in 1885, Turing found the idea that it should bother anyone so odd that he never gave its illegality or its social stigma a second thought. And if anyone at the time should have been appreciated and understood 7 Ibid., loc

5 beyond the scope of his sexuality, it should have been the man who proved so important in helping his country win the war. But almost immediately following the end of WWII, the Cold War began, and with it an epoch of unprecedented suspicion, innuendo, and allegations that led to such travesties of injustice as McCarthyism. It was about this same period that the British Intelligence Agency, MI5, was breached by the infamous Cambridge Five, a spy ring that passed secrets to the Soviets. Two of its members, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess were believed to be homosexuals. This caused UK intelligence agencies, as well as the CIA, to become especially distrustful of homosexuals, and Turing, despite his tremendous contributions, was a homosexual. He was also known to be unpredictable and uncontrollable and a man who knew a lot about his country s secret intelligence operations. So they began keeping an eye on him, and were particularly worried his sexual activities could be used by blackmail him in order to extort information. They were so worried about this in Turing s case that they took to following him, especially when he visited foreign countries. In January of 1952 he called the authorities to report a burglary by the acquaintance of a young lover he d taken into his home. The police ended up arresting Turing and the young man, Arnold Murray, for gross indecency. Both pleaded guilty, though Murray showed remorse and was portrayed by his attorney as a victim of Turing who led him astray. Turing, on the other hand, refused to show the slightest hint of remorse, leaving the courts no option but to punish him. But, at the insistence of many of his prominent friends who told the judge things like Turing was a national asset, and one of the most original mathematical minds of his generation, and that the public interest would not be served if this man is taken away from the very important work he is doing, 8 prison wasn t an option. Fortunately, at least as far as the court was concerned, there was a relatively new scientific treatment that could be used to treat Turing in order to keep him out of prison. Although compulsory castration wasn t legal, a leading researcher on homosexuality at the time, Gordon Westwood noted that lobotomy had been tried but proven unsuccessful. 9 Drugs that caused nausea, epileptic seizures, and shock treatment were also tried to no avail. This was so because the Criminal Justice Act of 1948 had emphasized the duty of the community to provide treatment for the habitual sex offender. 10 Just a few years earlier, in 1940, authorities in Hollywood, California began hormone experiments on 17 homosexual men they d taken into custody. 11 The assumption at the time was that gays and lesbians had their masculine and feminine hormones mixed up. Concluding these men weren t man enough, experimenters injected them with extra amounts of androgen, the male hormone, only to discover it increased their 8 Hodges, ibid., p Ibid., p Ibid., p Ibid., p

6 sex drive. They then tried giving them oestrogens, the female hormone, which decreased it. Keep in mind that in America, especially since the eugenic clean-up of the late nineteenth century, according to biographer Andrew Hodges, compulsory castration was legal. In 1950, he says, there were eleven states that allowed for compulsory castration, with fifty thousand cases on record. So the British courts, though a bit more lenient, still considered it their legal duty to treat Alan Turing. So they sentenced him to a year of probation and, of what they were then calling, organotherapy, based upon the 1949 successes of neurologist, F. L. Golla, who claimed that with large enough doses of oestrogen, libido could be abolished within a month. 12 The treatment had numerous ill effects on Turing. He gained a tremendous amount of weight, which was difficult for a man who had been a long distance runner of Olympic quality. Since it was also believed necessary that in order to dramatically reduce libido one had to have a gynaecomastic response, Turing grew breasts. Since the treatment also proved to be a cerebral depressant in lab rats, it may have had an effect upon Turing s brilliant mind as well. Although it was far from a chemical lobotomy, however, it was unequivocally a form of chemical castration. The truth is, nobody fully understands the treatment s negative impact on Turing since he remained stalwart before his friends. But within less than a year of completing his therapy, he was found dead in his home of an apparent suicide. Beside his body was a half eaten apple, apparently laced with cyanide, one of the chemicals he d been conducting experiments with. Turing had been obsessed with the Disney film, Snow White ever since he saw it in 1937, so it seemed an oddly poetic end. Much has also been made of the fact that a well-known computer logo is an apple with a bite taken out of it, which also seems morosely fitting. Just last year, July 19, 2013, the British Parliament issued a pardon for Turing, 59 years after his death. It is also most fitting, I believe, to recount the story of Alan Turing today, the first day of Pride Week, in order to broaden the scope of his famous test for computers to humans themselves. When do humans become human? Is it when they all think and act just alike? Is it when all individuals conform to the norms of society? Is it when we all look, act, think, and feel the same? Is that what makes us human? Is that why those who are different are so often called, subhuman, degenerate, or, deviant, as in Turing s case? Is it truly possible for there to even exist a lesser class of human beings? One that is beneath those in the majority? One whose ancestral quality is de-genetic, degenerate? One whose humanity has somehow deviated from the rest of humanity? When does one who is different become human? When a bill comes along giving them equal rights? When they are pardoned by Parliament. When they have been chemically or surgically altered to be just like everyone else? When they win a war? Or invent something that changes the entire world? Or when their statue is erected in Manchester? 12 Ibid., p

7 Alan Turing s story is the real Turing test, calling upon us all to ask when are we to consider others fully human, providing them with the same rights, respect, and dignity we want for ourselves. Surely the answer can t be 59 years after an international hero has been chemically castrated resulting in his suicide at age 42. That s too late. The answer must be right now. It always has been right now. Now, is the answer to the great Turing test. Now solves the enigma that is his story. Now is and has always been the time for equality, lest 59 years from now, or a hundred, or a thousand, we too must look back with regret upon our own injustice, upon our ingratitude and egregious lack of pride in those we should be most proud of. After passing his pardon into law, and determining to erect a statue in honor, Lord Rudolph Quirk stood and said, I end by noting something surely perverse, if constitutionally sound enough, about this bill. It would grant Alan a pardon, when surely all of us would far prefer to receive a pardon from him. 13 But this message isn t really about Alan Turing. Despite his posthumous pardon and the statue erected in his honor, it s too late for anyone to treat him with the respect and appreciation he deserved. Nor is it about the distant future when we ourselves might have pause to look back upon our own shortsightedness and errors in judgment. It s about those among us today who deserve better treatment; those we too easily overlook, or, worse, treat as less than ourselves because they are different. It s about right now when equality begins. 13 Doyle, ibid., loc