Alan Turing, the mathematician who thought of the universal machine. One that could be made and programmed to do a variety of tasks and then one day even be able to think.

His machine was never built. He did get money to start building it. It was called the ACE machine but became so modified from his original design it wasn’t his design anymore when it finally came together.

I came away from this book impressed with the skills, thoughts and original ideas it took to create the modern world that I enjoy today.

The rules he setup for his machine allowed the application of mathematics and the language of logic to program the machine to perform whatever task the programmer desired.

He proposed that eventually a machine would be able to think. And created what came to be known as the Turing test to identify a thinking machine. Basically if you were chatting with a machine and couldn’t tell the difference between the machine and a real human then the machine will have passed the Turing test.

The tragedy of the story is how he was persecuted by the state for his homosexuality, forced to take hormone altering drugs and it likely lead to his suicide.