RDG%SU-AI@sri-unix.UUCP (11/15/83)
From: Russell Greiner <RDG@SU-AI>
[Reprinted from the SU-SCORE bboard.]
n055 1247 09 Nov 83
BC-BOOK-REVIEW (UNDATED)
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
c. 1983 N.Y. Times News Service
ALAN TURING: The Enigma. By Andrew Hodges. 587 pages.
Illustrated. Simon & Schuster. $22.50.
He is remembered variously as the British cryptologist whose
so-called ''Enigma'' machine helped to decipher Germany's top-secret
World War II code; as the difficult man who both pioneered and
impeded the advance of England's computer industry; and as the
inventor of a theoretical automaton sometimes called the ''Turing
(Editors: umlaut over the u) Machine,'' the umlaut being, according
to a glossary published in 1953, ''an unearned and undesirable
addition, due, presumably, to an impression that anything so
incomprehensible must be Teutonic.''
But this passionately exhaustive biography by Andrew Hodges, an
English mathematician, brings Alan Turing very much back to life and
offers a less forbidding impression. Look at any of the many verbal
snapshots that Hodges offers us in his book - Turing as an
eccentrically unruly child who could keep neither his buttons aligned
nor the ink in his pen, and who answered his father when asked if he
would be good, ''Yes, but sometimes I shall forget!''; or Turing as
an intense young man with a breathless high-pitched voice and a
hiccuppy laugh - and it is difficult to think of him as a dark
umlauted enigma.
Yet the mind of the man was an awesome force. By the time he was 24
years old, in 1936, he had conceived as a mathematical abstraction
his computing machine and completed the paper ''Computable Numbers,''
which offered it to the world. Thereafter, Hodges points out, his
waves of inspiration seemed to flow in five-year intervals - the
Naval Enigma in 1940, the design for his Automatic Computing Engine
(ACE) in 1945, a theory of structural evolution, or morphogenesis, in
1950. In 1951, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was
not yet 40.
But the next half-decade interval did not bring further revelation.
In February 1952, he was arrested, tried, convicted and given a
probationary sentence for ''Gross Indecency contrary to Section 11 of
the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885,'' or the practice of male
homosexuality, a ''tendency'' he had never denied and in recent years
had admitted quite openly. On June 7, 1954, he was found dead in his
home near Manchester, a bitten, presumably cyanide-laced apple in his
hand.
Yet he had not been despondent over his legal problems. He was not
in disgrace or financial difficulty. He had plans and ideas; his work
was going well. His devoted mother - about whom he had of late been
having surprisingly (to him) hostile dreams as the result of a
Jungian psychoanalysis - insisted that his death was the accident she
had long feared he would suffer from working with dangerous
chemicals. The enigma of Alan Mathison Turing began to grow.
Andrew Hodges is good at explaining Turing's difficult ideas,
particularly the evolution of his theoretical computer and the
function of his Enigma machines. He is adept at showing us the
originality of Turing's mind, especially the passion for truth (even
when it damaged his career) and the insistence on bridging the worlds
of the theoretical and practical. The only sections of the biography
that grow tedious are those that describe the debates over artificial
intelligence - or maybe it's the world's resistance to artificial
intelligence that is tedious. Turing's position was straightforward
enough: ''The original question, 'Can machines think?' I believe to
be too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that
at the end of the century the use of words and general educated
opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of
machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.''
On the matter of Turing's suicide, Hodges concedes its
incomprehensibility, but then announces with sudden melodrama: ''The
board was ready for an end game different from that of Lewis
Carroll's, in which Alice captured the Red Queen, and awoke from
nightmare. In real life, the Red Queen had escaped to feasting and
fun in Moscow. The White Queen would be saved, and Alan Turing
sacrificed.''
What does Hodges mean by his portentous reference to cold-war
politics? Was Alan Turing a murdered spy? Was he a spy? Was he the
victim of some sort of double-cross? No, he was none of the above:
the author is merely speculating that as the cold war heated up, it
must have become extremely dangerous to be a homosexual in possession
of state secrets. Hodges is passionate on the subject of the
precariousness of being homosexual; it was partly his participation
in the ''gay liberation'' movement that got him interested in Alan
Turing in the first place.
Indeed, one has to suspect Hodges of an overidentification with Alan
Turing, for he goes on at far too great length on Turing's
existential vulnerability. Still, word by word and sentence by
sentence, he can be exceedingly eloquent on his subject. ''He had
clung to the simple amidst the distracting and frightening complexity
of the world,'' the author writes of Turing's affinity for the
concrete.
''Yet he was not a narrow man,'' Hodges continues. ''Mrs. Turing was
right in saying, as she did, that he died while working on a
dangerous experiment. It was the experiment called LIFE - a subject
largely inducing as much fear and embarrassment for the official
scientific world as for her. He had not only thought freely, as best
he could, but had eaten of two forbidden fruits, those of the world
and of the flesh. They violently disagreed with each other, and in
that disagreement lay the final unsolvable problem.''