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Alan Turing: The 41-Year Life That Underpins Every Computer and AI

Lately, as I read through historical materials, I keep running across fascinating people in the history of the internet and computing, with twisty lives and dramatic eras. So I've decided to open a new section here, focusing on those people and those stories. Follow me if you're interested.

Have you ever realized that the phone in your hand, the computer on your desk, the servers connected by the network, even the hot AI models of recent years, all trace back to a single person: Alan Turing.

You may have heard the name, or you may have heard that beautiful legend about the Apple logo. He was a war hero who broke codes, a pioneer who defined computation and imagined AI, and the most lamented genius in the tragedy of his age.

Image from the internet; delete upon infringement.

On June 8, 1954, in Manchester, England, a housekeeper opened the door. Alan Turing lay quietly in bed, no longer breathing.

On the nightstand lay an apple with one bite taken out of it. He was only 41 years old that year.

A Lonely Boy Living in His Own Logical World

Alan Turing was born in London on June 23, 1912. Because his parents worked in India for long stretches, he was left with strangers as a child. Perhaps due to that lack of companionship, he grew up introverted and quirky, with an unmistakable mismatch with the world.

In his school days at Sherborne School, he disliked Latin, didn't follow rules, and filled his head with nothing but mathematics and natural laws.

Image from the internet; delete upon infringement.

Compared with his hardworking peers, the school staff didn't think highly of him; they found him strange and rebellious.

In his early youth he met the most important person in his life: Christopher Morcom.

They were both obsessed with science, half kindred spirits, half lovers.

But fate is fickle. In 1930, Christopher died suddenly.

That parting changed Turing deeply.

Perhaps his later obsessive work on logic and the laws of life was, in some sense, a search for an answer in the rational world that could stand against the randomness of fate.

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In 1931, Turing entered King's College, Cambridge. At age 24, he wrote a paper that would reshape the future: "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem."

In that paper, he conceived an abstract machine called the "Turing machine": an infinitely long tape, a read/write head, that reads, writes, and moves according to fixed rules.

It wasn't the complicated circuits we know, and it didn't involve the countless transistors packed into modern chips.

It was a purely mathematical construct, but it defined what an algorithm is, what is computable, and what problems can never be computed.

This theory defined the foundation of "computation." Every computer, phone, and server you hold today is, in essence, a physical implementation of that abstract Turing machine.

Image from the internet; delete upon infringement.

At 24, on paper, this young man sketched out the entire blueprint of the digital civilization.

He later went to Princeton for further study. John von Neumann admired him and invited him to stay as an assistant.

But Turing refused. He went back to England.

He could never have imagined that at age 27 he would be drawn into a world war, and that the moment would push him to the center of history.

The Hero Who Ended WWII Early

In 1939, the Second World War broke out.

After the war started, the German Enigma cipher machine was the nightmare of the Allies.

The cipher was brilliantly designed; it changed keys daily, with combinations running into the hundreds of millions. Because the Germans changed the Enigma key every day, breaking it within a 24-hour window was the only way to exploit the intelligence.

Because of that design, the Germans reasonably believed it could never be broken.

Out on the Atlantic, German submarines used encrypted communications to hunt Allied supply ships, sending supplies and soldiers to the bottom.

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In the autumn of 1939, Bletchley Park, Britain's secret intelligence station, brought Turing in.

There, Turing led the design of the Bombe, an electromechanical machine built specifically to crack the Enigma.

It wasn't a modern computer, but it was an early prototype of large-scale automatic computation.

With the Bombe, Turing and his team steadily decrypted German transmissions, learning submarine routes and battle plans in advance.

Replica scene at Bletchley Park (image from internet; delete upon infringement)

This is why many historians now believe: Turing's codebreaking work shortened the war by at least two years and saved tens of millions of lives.

He was unquestionably a hero of that war, but he had to stay silent.

Because that credit was top secret, he couldn't talk about it for decades.

After the war, he couldn't accept public honors, couldn't tell anyone what he had done.

The hero's "medal" was buried under a secrecy agreement, unknown even to his family and friends.

Pilot ACE (image from Wikipedia; delete upon infringement)

After the war, Turing decided to continue pursuing his computer dreams.

At the UK's National Physical Laboratory, he proposed the ACE (Automatic Computing Engine) design, and later at Manchester University he worked on the Manchester Mark I, one of the earliest stored-program computers.

In 1950, Turing wrote and published the "Programmer's Handbook for Manchester Electronic Computer," continued his theoretical work in mathematical logic, and proposed the famous "imitation game," which we now call the Turing test.

He put forward the hypothesis: if, through text conversation, a human cannot tell whether they are speaking to a person or a machine, then we can consider that machine to be intelligent.

In October of the same year, Turing published another seminal paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," in which he first raised the fundamental question of AI: can machines think?

In fact, DeepSeek's Liang Wenfeng mentioned the AGI goal; Yann LeCun, Andrew Ng, and Gary Marcus argue that current architectures cannot achieve AGI; OpenAI's Sam Altman believes basic AGI will appear in 5 to 10 years.

These debates, in essence, are still responding to Turing's question. To this day, that question remains the starting point of AI controversy.

The Tragedy of the Era

Everything seemed to be "rosy," but for Turing it was an illusion. The hand of fate picked the apple from the tree and placed it in his hands.

In 1952, Turing's home was burgled. While investigating the theft, the police accidentally uncovered his sexual orientation.

Image from the internet; delete upon infringement.

For us today, this is a personal choice. Some might not understand it, but they might still respect it.

In Britain at the time, however, homosexuality was a serious crime, charged as "gross indecency."

The court gave him two choices: two years in prison, or a year of injected estrogen, commonly known as chemical castration.

To avoid interrupting his research, Turing chose the latter.

But the drugs caused severe physical side effects; his body began to change uncontrollably, and his emotional state continuously deteriorated.

Worse, once convicted, he lost his security clearance and could no longer participate in national cipher projects; he was permanently shut out of the intelligence system.

Image from the internet; delete upon infringement.

In court, he did not fight hard; he calmly told the judge: "I do not believe I did anything wrong."

But the people of that era clearly didn't agree, so the war hero who had saved millions was labeled a criminal.

Under the combined blows of physical, physiological, and professional collapse, the mind that had envisioned computers and imagined AI slowly withered under the daily torture of the drugs.

On June 7, 1954, Turing finally took from fate's hand the apple laced with cyanide, took a bite, and lay down on his bed.

Cyanide took him, at just 41 years old.

I should clarify here: the bitten apple on the nightstand has long been linked by popular imagination to the Apple logo.

Many rumors say it was the inspiration for Apple's logo. But the designer Rob Janoff has stated clearly in many interviews: the bite mark was simply a practical design for recognition. When he designed it, he never thought of Turing, and no one ever mentioned using the symbol to honor Turing.

Perhaps the story spread so widely because the narrative is so powerful: the founder of computing, a tragic genius, a poisoned apple; and a great computer company whose logo happens to be a bitten apple.

The emotions fit perfectly, and people are more willing to believe this romantic tribute.

A Late Apology

The correction of the era came too slowly.

In 2009, the British government publicly apologized to Turing.

In 2013, Queen Elizabeth II granted Turing a royal pardon.

In 2017, the UK passed the "Turing Law," pardoning all others convicted under the same laws.

In 2018, the Bank of England decided to put a portrait of a prominent contributor to science on the new £50 note, with nominations from the public. In the end, Turing beat the other candidates and was chosen as the face of the new pound note.

UK £50 plastic note (image from internet; delete upon infringement)

But this innocence, this honor, he would never see.

Conclusion

Today, when we talk about Turing, it's easy to reduce him to a label: father of the computer, father of AI.

But to his family, to his era, he was far more than a technical symbol.

He was a lonely, sensitive, gentle person. As a young man he lost his beloved; in wartime he saved the world in anonymity; he sought order in reason and eventually died from prejudice.

What Turing left us isn't just the Turing machine and the Turing test.

He left a question: as machines become more and more like people, how do we define intelligence?

And his life leaves another heavy question: how should a civilization treat the geniuses who differ from the majority?

I am Li Jianyi, a programmer paying tribute to the pioneers of computing history. Follow my WeChat public account of the same name.