Transcription
Very soon, Technology Week returns. Expect it in 1936, 10 years before the first computer was built. A man created it in his mind, and that product of his imagination served as the basis for all computing to this day. That same man found a way to break Nazi codes and helped end World War II two years early, indirectly saving 14 million lives. The same man was the one who designed the most important test to determine if a computer can think or not, and passing that test has been the goal of Artificial Intelligence to this day. Today we are going to talk about one of the most brilliant minds in history, Alan Turing. So, sit down, grab your popcorn, and enjoy this story because you are on the team, and you know that in Spanish, no one explains it better.
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The Turing Machine. Alan Turing was born on June 23, 1912, in London. He was the son of a wealthy family, but he barely saw his parents because they worked in India. In those times, India was a British colony, so Turing studied in boarding schools where he developed a passion for mathematics. Later, he entered King's College, Cambridge, one of the most important universities in the United Kingdom. In those times, David Hilbert was the most important mathematician in Europe and was obsessed with defining a formal language that would express all of mathematics through symbols. In Hilbert's opinion, which was supported by almost all mathematicians of his time, there was nothing unproven or indemonstrable in mathematics. To give you an example, in 1910, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North published *Principia Mathematica*, a book in which it took them 360 pages just to prove that one plus one equals two. Seriously. To define all of mathematics, Hilbert posed three questions that supposedly should be answered with yes, yes, and yes. Number one: Are mathematics complete? Number two: Are mathematics consistent? And number three: Is there a set of steps to determine if a statement is true or false? This last question is what is known as the decision problem, or *Entscheidungsproblem* in German, and it sought to ensure that there were no impossible-to-prove statements like Goldbach's conjecture or Collatz's conjecture, which if you don't know what they are, you can Google them, as they are very easy to understand but impossible to prove. Kurt Gödel, at 25 years old, presented his famous incompleteness theorem, which states that mathematics is an incomplete system and that to solve all its problems, we must accept unprovable things and even invent answers. With this theorem, Gödel answered no and no to Hilbert's first two questions and, incidentally, turned the world of mathematics upside down because imagine telling all mathematicians that their system is incomplete and inconsistent. And what does all this have to do with Turing? It has everything to do with it, because Turing answered no to Hilbert's third question, and he did it with a computer, ten years before the first computer was built. How is this possible? It turns out that in 1936, Turing wrote an essay titled "On Computable Numbers." In simple terms, it stated that there are two types of numbers: computable numbers, meaning those that can be calculated with a series of steps or an algorithm, and non-computable numbers, those for which there is no way to arrive at them. This answered no to Hilbert's last question and initiated the era of computing. Because to answer this question, Turing invented a computer. In those times, computers were human beings who performed calculations following a series of instructions. So, Turing thought he could design a machine that would do the same as a human computer, that is, solve any logical problem if given the appropriate series of instructions. It should be taken into account that the Turing machine is just a theoretical model that Turing never built, but at the same time, it was the basis for the first computers and even for those of today. The Turing machine had an incredibly simple yet effective operation. It consisted of a paper tape that could be infinite. That tape was divided into squares of the same size, and in each square, there could be a 0, a 1, or a blank space. It also had a head that would read the square it was currently on, only one square at a time, and which, in addition to reading, could erase and write on the square. Yes, a complete square. That head could also move forward or backward on the tape. Inside the head, there is a small internal memory that contains states. Every time the head reads a square, the following happens: Number one, it writes a new value in that square, or erases it, or leaves it as is. Number two, it changes state. And number three, it moves left or right. But how does it know whether to write, erase, or leave the square's value the same? Also, how does it know which state to change to and whether to move left or right? Thanks to something Turing called an instruction table, but which we now simply know as a program or algorithm. This table would be the first assembly language in history. The following instruction table, which is just an example, says that if the head is in state q1 and reads a 0, it should write 0 in the square and move to state q2. Then, if it is in state q2 and reads a 1, it should move right, right, print 1, p1, and then move to state q3. With this model, which was an abstraction of a computer, Turing demonstrated that with the right set of instructions, the machine could solve any problem. And this simple model, believe it or not, is the basis of all computers, even current ones. Two new courses have arrived at Ed.team: the update to the 2023 Fundamentals of Networks course. If you want to become a network administrator, this is the first course you should take with Professor Paula León. And for our web development students, the workshop has arrived for you to create an e-commerce site with Django, including a payment gateway, with Professor César Mayta. If you are a Premium student, all classes are already available in your account. And if not, you can watch the first classes for free and see why no one explains it better in Spanish than Ed.team.
Nazi Codes, Enigma, and Turing. When World War II broke out in 1939, Turing was summoned to the Government Code and Cypher School to work on deciphering German communications. The group of codebreakers, or cryptanalysts, was installed in an old mansion called Bletchley Park, north of London, where they worked organized in huts. In 1940, France surrendered to Germany, and the United Kingdom was left without allies in Europe. The German plan was to starve the United Kingdom by surrounding it with submarines that would sink all ships carrying supplies like fuel, weapons, or food. The only way to prevent this from happening was to intercept and decipher German communications to know the position of the submarines and divert the ships. But there was a small problem: the submarines communicated with a machine called Enigma, which would be indecipherable. This was similar to a typewriter and had several versions, the most secure of which was the one used by the submarines. In simple terms, the Enigma machine replaced one letter with another, it's that easy. The operator pressed a letter on the keyboard, and other letters lit up on the panel. The complex part was that it had hundreds of billions of possible combinations. This is how it worked: look, Enigma had three rotors that changed one letter for another. Before starting to encrypt a message, the operator turned the rotors to a specific position. It also had plugboards that formed pairs of letters to replace them. So, when an operator pressed a letter on the keyboard, it was transformed into another by the plugboard, then transformed into another by the first rotor, another by the second rotor, and another by the third rotor. Furthermore, every time a letter was changed, the rotors also changed position, changing the entire configuration of the machine. Then, the whole process was done in reverse: first, the rotors, which changed position again each time a letter was changed, and then the plugboards, and finally, the result lit up on the panel. The machine operator would write down each letter that lit up, and once they had the resulting message, they would send it by Morse code to the receiver, who would do the process in reverse: enter the encrypted message into Enigma, and the letters of the message would appear on the light panel. To decipher Enigma, one needed to know the position of the rotors and plugboards, and considering the number of possible combinations, trying them one by one was not an option. Moreover, these positions were changed every day, so they only had 24 hours to find the combination. The Nazi operators knew the positions because they received the instructions at the beginning of each month. So, the codebreakers analyzed the messages to find words that had a high probability of appearing, such as "Heer" (army), "Hitler," and "post." Since a letter was never encrypted as itself, they could manually search for repetitions to discard that option or accept that option. To give you an example to understand it better, let's assume that "detim" has been encrypted as "xmqxj." We can discard that option because the same letter "e," which repeats in the original message, also repeats in the encrypted message. But still, progress was very slow, and few messages could be deciphered. So, Turing designed a machine called the Bombe, inspired by another machine that the Poles had created earlier to decipher a less secure version of Enigma. And since Enigma was deciphered with Enigma itself, Turing's Bombe was a replica of 36 Enigmas with their rotors and plugboards. Configurations that were supposed to be correct were entered into this machine, and it discarded the option if it found collisions or repeated letters, as I explained above. When the machine stopped, it delivered a rotor and plugboard configuration that was then tested on a real Enigma machine. And if the result was not correct, the work of reconfiguring and rewiring the Bombes would start again. It was very arduous, and more than 2,000 women were brought in to work in shifts at Bletchley Park so that the machine could work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But not all the work was done at Bletchley Park, as military operations were carried out to seize Enigma instructions from ships and submarines. And although the complete instructions were never obtained, only fragments, because the Germans had orders to get rid of Enigma and its instructions when attacked, Turing still managed to deduce the missing parts through sheer mental force. Incredible. And it reached a point where the codebreakers read the messages at the same time as the German receivers. Thanks to this, German submarines could no longer sink British ships, and the government, to prevent the Germans from realizing they were being deciphered, leaked false information that they had a new type of radar that could detect the position of submarines. After Enigma, the Germans created a superior machine called Lorenz, which the British called Tunny. It could not be deciphered by Turing's Bombes, as it required the power of an electronic machine. The Bombes were electromechanical, which means they were much slower. So, Tommy Flowers was summoned to Bletchley, where he worked on the creation of the first electronic computer in history, Colossus, which was based on the design of the Turing machine. The team built Colossus in 11 months and used the same strategies as Turing in deciphering Nazi messages, only with greater computing power. Colossus began operating in 1943, and messages from Hitler himself were deciphered. Thus, it was known that the war was about to end, as his generals were asking for permission to retreat, and Hitler denied it. Thanks to these leaks, the Germans ran out of fuel and strategic positions, and on June 6, 1944, Allied troops, including the United States, landed in Normandy, in northern France, while they made the Germans believe they were going to land much further north, in Calais. The Normandy landings, or D-Day, were the beginning of the end of the war, as less than a year later, on May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered. Hitler committed suicide a week earlier, a coward. After the war, Flowers' Colossi were destroyed by government order, and the codebreakers were dismissed. Not only that, but they never received the recognition they deserved for advancing the end of the war by two years and indirectly saving the lives of 14 million people, because their work was confidential, and if that seems like a lot, they were forbidden from telling anyone what they had worked on from 1939 to 1945. Not even their families knew they were heroes. Turing could never tell his own mother about his achievements, and all his work remained strictly secret until the year 2000, when a report written by three cryptanalysts, Turing's colleagues, was revealed. Master the careers of the future and work anywhere in the world without leaving home. Thousands of people have increased their income, found their first job, or created their own company by studying at Ed.team. You can be next. Start studying for free at ed.team/cursos and discover why no one explains it better in Spanish than Ed.team.
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Artificial Intelligence and the Turing Test. In 1950, Turing wrote his second seminal treatise, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," in which he posed the question of whether machines think. Turing believed that since a computer follows a sequence of logical steps, and that is the same thing humans do, then computers could think. But since to define if a machine thinks, we must first define what kind of machines we are talking about and then define what we mean by thinking, Turing preferred to design a test that eliminated all debates. This test was called the imitation game, although history remembers it as the Turing test. It consists of the following: Number one, we have three players: a judge, a machine, and a person. Number two, the judge, the machine, and the person are in separate rooms and cannot see or hear each other; they can only communicate by text. Number three, then, the judge asks, in turns, both the person and the machine, and if at the end of the game, the judge cannot differentiate who is the machine and who is the person, then the machine has passed the test. Obviously, this proposal caused much rejection, even among other technology specialists who made fun of Turing. But over time, this test has become a classic of Artificial Intelligence, and the goal has always been to surpass it. Alan Turing had predicted that it would take 100 years to surpass this test, that is, by the year 2050. He was wrong, because the Turing test was surpassed in 2014, 64 years later, by the chatbot Eugene Goostman, who managed to fool one-third of the judges in a competition. Although there has been much disagreement about whether it truly passed the Turing test or not, we can say with certainty that by 2023, with the explosion of generative Artificial Intelligence that we are experiencing, the Turing test has been widely surpassed.
His Processing and Death. Alan Turing discovered his homosexuality during his adolescence when he fell in love with a classmate named Christopher, who died of tuberculosis, leaving him with a deep wound. However, his sexual orientation was never a problem for him until December 1951. During the period when Turing was recording a radio program for the BBC about thinking machines, he met Arnold Murray and began a relationship with him. In those days, Turing suffered a burglary at his home, apparently by a friend of Murray's, and when he reported it to the police, he ended up confessing his homosexual relationship. For that year, these types of relationships were a crime in the United Kingdom; they would only cease to be so in 1967. So, Turing faced a prison sentence. Max Newman, his mentor at Cambridge, testified at the trial and insisted on what science would lose if Turing were sent to prison. Therefore, the sentence was changed to 12 months of probation and medical treatment, which consisted of injecting him with female hormones for a year – a chemical castration. This punishment lasted until mid-1953. That was the reward he received from his country after helping to save it. He was found dead on the afternoon of Tuesday, June 8, 1954, by his housekeeper. There was a white, foamy liquid around his mouth with the smell of cyanide and a poisoned apple on his nightstand with the imprint of a bite. It is said that Turing committed suicide after falling into a deep depression due to the inhumane treatment he received for his homosexuality, which caused serious disorders in his body. If so, and this is the official version, Turing's death is one of the greatest injustices in history. However, Turing's mother never accepted the suicide version, and there are theories that he could have inhaled cyanide from his laboratory wall or that the apple could have been infected in the laboratory without him noticing. Even more extreme theories say he could have been murdered by Russian secret agents because he was in the midst of the Cold War, but those are just theories. When Steve Jobs was asked if the Apple logo with the bitten apple was a tribute to Alan Turing, he said no, that he actually didn't know the story and that it was a coincidence, but that he would have loved it to be true. In 2009, Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, issued a public apology to Turing. However, in 2012, the government denied that pardon, arguing that in 1953, homosexuality was a crime. In 2012, the pardon was denied, the year that would have marked the 100th anniversary of Turing's birth. The official pardon finally arrived in 2013 from Queen Elizabeth II, and even so, without considering how retrograde it is to offer a posthumous apology and then deny it. I believe it is incorrect to talk about forgiving Turing; I believe it is the opposite: it is the government that should apologize to Turing, instead of the government being the one to forgive. What do you think?
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The Legacy of Alan Turing. Albert Einstein once said that imagination is more important than knowledge, and with Alan Turing, this statement is 100% true because Turing designed computers in his head, solved the riddles of the Enigma machine in his mind, and if he built the Bombes, it was to accelerate the mechanical part of the work. Turing also imagined a test to evaluate Artificial Intelligence 64 years before it could be surpassed. Without a doubt, imagination can take you where knowledge cannot. Turing's story also teaches us the backwardness caused by prejudice and by canceling people who think differently. How much more would Turing have achieved if he hadn't died so young? We will never know, but it is certain that just as he advanced the end of the war by a couple of years, he would have advanced the development of technology by several years as well. Few people have had such an impact on the world of technology as Alan Turing, and the computer you are using to watch this video, whether it's a cell phone, a tablet, or a laptop, is based on Turing's design from almost 90 years ago. Today, you learned his story and his legacy, and when someone asks you how you know so much about Alan Turing, tell them you learned it at Ed.team. Start studying for free at ed.team and discover why no one explains it better in Spanish.