An inquest ruled it suicide, but there seems to be some evidence it was accidental.Īlan Turing has become a hero (and something of a martyr) in the Gay Pride activist movement. Two years later, he died of cyanide poisoning. He was stripped of his security clearance, sacked as a cryptographic consultant to the British Signals Intelligence Agency, marginalized, and essentially put out to pasture. In 1952, Turing pled guilty to charges of “gross indecency” for homosexual acts, and agreed to chemical castration by estrogen injection in lieu of prison.
He also became interested in biology, and developed mathematical computer modeling of biochemical processes. He developed much of the conceptual framework that is still used in developing digital information technologies to this day. Touring also framed his famous test to provide a working definition of artificial intelligence.
For all we know, it may have made the difference between winning and losing. Some people estimate that the intelligence this work produced shortened the war by 2-4 years. Completed before the end of the war, it was fast enough to crack messages in real time using statistical cryptanalysis techniques. Turing’s work on cracking the Lorenz machine eventually led to the construction of Colossus, the world’s first functioning programmable electronic digital computer. Enigma was used to encrypt military messages to the field, and to ships and submarines of the German navy Lorenz was used to encrypt messages among the German high command.
Turing’s work for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, England, was instrumental in breaking the German Enigma and Lorenz cypher machines during World War II.