XI Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2019

Turing Alan Mathison was born on June 23, 1912 in a London hotel. Today, there is a plaque hanging on it: “Alan Turing was born here, a pioneer of cybernetics and a code hacker.”. Turing's mother returned to India after she had given birth, leaving Alan in the care of a family friend, who was a retired colonel. After that the boy was sent to a private boarding school. He was fascinated by science (chemistry, physics and mathematics). In 1935, Alan Turing began his undergraduate studies at Cambridge Royal College and began to create a "thinking machine" - the theoretical prototype of a modern computer.

The main role in the development of cybernetics and computer theory is usually assigned to American professor Norbert Wiener. The value of the contribution of Alan Turing is unfairly underestimated. In 1939, the British military department set Turing the task of unraveling the secret of the Enigma, a special device used to encrypt radio messages in the German navy and the Luftwaffe.

British intelligence got this device, but the Germans could not decipher the intercepted radiograms of the Germans. Turing was free to act. He invited several friends of chess players to his department of the British School of Codes and Ciphers.

For example, Harry Golombek worked for him, who later became a well-known FIDE judge and was a judge in the final match for the world champion between Fisher and Spassky.

27-year-old Turing and his colleagues were covered by this sports passion. The Germans believed that Enigma was impregnable. The complexity of decoding was aggravated by the fact that the coded word produced more letters than in the original. However, after half a year, Turing developed a device called the Bomb, which allowed him to read almost all the messages of the Luftwaffe. A year later, a more complex version of the Enigma, used by Nazi submariners, was “hacked”. This largely determined the success of the British fleet.

The merits of Alan Turing were appreciated: after the defeat of Germany, he received an order and was included in the scientific group involved in the creation of the British electronic computer.

In 1951, one of the world's first computers began operating in Manchester. Turing has been developing software for it. Then he wrote the first computer chess program. It was only an algorithm, because a computer capable of executing this program has not existed yet.

Chess was not the only hobby of this man. He was involved in running, cross country cross country. In 1947, at the All-English Marathon, took the honorable fifth place. In addition to working at the university, Turing continued to cooperate with the Codes Department. Only now in the center of his attention were the ciphers of Soviet residents in England. In 1951 he was elected a member of the royal scientific society.

The wording “Turing test” implies a situation in which a question is asked whether a person, communicating in a similar situation with a certain interlocutor, can determine whether he is communicating with another person or with an artificial device.

This mental experiment had a number of fundamental consequences. First, he suggested some operational criteria for answering the question "Can a device think?".

Secondly, this criterion is linguistic: this question was explicitly replaced by the question of whether the machine can adequately communicate with a person in a natural language. Turing wrote directly about the replacement of the wording and at the same time expressed confidence that "the method of questions and answers is suitable to cover almost any area of ​​human activity that we want to introduce into consideration."

This test has played an important role in the further development of artificial intelligence, research on modeling understanding and production of natural language. Alan Turing changed our perception of computers and created the foundations for the development of modern computer systems.