My first encounter with the legend of Alan Turing was in college. Study computers and you are bound to encounter the name. He was truly a visionary in the realm of computers and mathematics, and his efforts are lauded by many as one of the major reasons World War II ended so darned well for the West. And then there’s that whole Turing Test thing he thought up, essentially a means to determine if a computer was intelligent or not.

It wasn’t until much later that I heard about the other side of Turing’s life. He was a homosexual in a time when it was still illegal to be one. This astounds me, as a rational person not clouded by dogmatic religion. I have always assumed that homosexuality and heterosexuality in others was none of my bloody business, and so long as someone’s proclivities one way or the other were not being forced upon me, what they chose to do and whom they chose to do it with were really none of my business. To continue my thought from yesterday, being gay is just another adjective.

In Turing’s day, though, that wasn’t quite the mood of the people. To have man-on-man sex was to commit an act of Gross Indecency, the same charge that was leveled at Oscar Wilde. Turing chose to be chemically castrated rather than serve jail time, and eventually took his own life. It is a tragic story, and not without its mysteries.

I mention all of this because I just read a really great piece on that side of Alan Turing’s life called The Turing Problem and I thought I’d pass it on to those who might be interested. It is, at the very least, a good reminder of how far we have come.

Jim