1
00:00:06,161 --> 00:00:10,521
<i>One day ladies will be walking their
computers in the park and saying</i>

2
00:00:10,561 --> 00:00:14,961
<i>'do you know, my iittie computer
said a very funny thing to me this morning'.</i>

3
00:00:24,361 --> 00:00:28,321
<i>In 1952, the greatest
mathematician of his time</i>

4
00:00:28,361 --> 00:00:32,681
<i>the man who gave birth to the
computer age was in torment.</i>

5
00:00:35,401 --> 00:00:37,441
<i>He was a recently convicted criminal.</i>

6
00:00:40,081 --> 00:00:42,761
<i>In distress, he turned to a psychiatrist.</i>

7
00:00:43,481 --> 00:00:46,121
So what did you say to the police?

8
00:00:46,601 --> 00:00:49,321
I told them I'd been having
an affair with Arnold Murray

9
00:00:49,361 --> 00:00:52,281
and that he'd given my
address to a young man

10
00:00:52,321 --> 00:00:54,841
who was known to burgle
men he'd met for sex.

11
00:00:57,281 --> 00:00:59,281
<i>This man was Alan Turing.</i>

12
00:01:00,681 --> 00:01:04,881
<i>Just a few years before, he'd helped
to turn the course of World War Two</i>

13
00:01:07,121 --> 00:01:10,121
<i>by cracking Germany's
secret military codes.</i>

14
00:01:11,921 --> 00:01:16,001
Turing is one of the great original
thinkers of the 20th century.

15
00:01:16,761 --> 00:01:19,601
He had thoughts that
nobody else was having.

16
00:01:23,281 --> 00:01:26,721
<i>Ten years earlier, he'd laid down
the foundations for the computer.</i>

17
00:01:28,641 --> 00:01:31,201
There's often a seed
that everything came from.

18
00:01:32,841 --> 00:01:36,681
Alan Turing basically came up with
everything that computers do today.

19
00:01:39,161 --> 00:01:43,361
<i>During his lifetime, Turing's
achievements went unrecognised.</i>

20
00:01:43,401 --> 00:01:45,761
<i>Instead he was disgraced.</i>

21
00:01:46,441 --> 00:01:49,241
But I can't get it outside myself to do it.

22
00:01:49,281 --> 00:01:51,281
We all have decisions to make.

23
00:01:51,321 --> 00:01:52,521
What are you saying?

24
00:01:52,561 --> 00:01:54,641
I wish they'd leave me alone.

25
00:01:54,681 --> 00:01:57,801
<i>This film tells the story of Alan Turing</i>

26
00:01:58,241 --> 00:02:01,681
<i>and how his ideas changed our world.</i>

27
00:02:02,681 --> 00:02:04,641
You may have something there, doctor.

28
00:02:32,081 --> 00:02:36,601
<i>The psychiatrist Alan Turing sought
help from was Doctor Franz Greenbaum</i>

29
00:02:36,641 --> 00:02:40,281
<i>a German Jew who had fled to Britain
just before World War Two.</i>

30
00:02:41,881 --> 00:02:43,841
Presumably you'd like me to stop as well

31
00:02:43,881 --> 00:02:46,081
but I can tell you now,
there's little point in trying.

32
00:02:46,761 --> 00:02:48,961
Like you to stop what?

33
00:02:49,521 --> 00:02:51,721
Pursuing... male...

34
00:02:51,761 --> 00:02:53,401
Male?

35
00:02:54,441 --> 00:02:55,961
Companionship.

36
00:02:56,721 --> 00:02:59,321
We're not here for me,
you're here for you.

37
00:03:00,161 --> 00:03:03,641
It doesn't matter to me what you do
as long as you're not in conflict over it.

38
00:03:05,401 --> 00:03:14,401
Our father Franz Greenbaum
was treating Alan in the early 1950s.

39
00:03:15,441 --> 00:03:19,761
He turned up in the most extraordinary
clothes when he came.

40
00:03:19,801 --> 00:03:22,801
He looked as though he'd
been out of a rag bag.

41
00:03:25,281 --> 00:03:30,881
I don't think our Dad was
in any way prejudiced...

42
00:03:31,521 --> 00:03:34,601
towards homosexuality.
- Oh, I'm sure he wasn't. No.

43
00:03:34,641 --> 00:03:41,081
At that time, in England,
that was considered quite way out.

44
00:03:43,361 --> 00:03:46,641
So, how do we do this?

45
00:03:47,721 --> 00:03:48,881
We talk.

46
00:03:49,401 --> 00:03:50,761
What do I have to say?

47
00:03:50,801 --> 00:03:52,681
You don't have to say anything.

48
00:03:53,161 --> 00:03:56,241
But you should feel free
to say whatever you like.

49
00:03:56,521 --> 00:04:00,321
There are some things I can't say,
things you can't know, about the war...

50
00:04:00,961 --> 00:04:02,841
Things you can't even think.

51
00:04:03,561 --> 00:04:07,121
There are some things about which
I'm under an obligation

52
00:04:07,161 --> 00:04:11,721
a legal obligation, to remain discreet.

53
00:04:12,201 --> 00:04:14,721
Well, there may be things
that you feel you can't discuss

54
00:04:15,641 --> 00:04:20,361
but direct conversation is not the only way
that material gets conveyed.

55
00:04:21,561 --> 00:04:23,281
How else does material get conveyed?

56
00:04:24,281 --> 00:04:26,641
Through dreams, for instance.

57
00:04:27,361 --> 00:04:30,121
Well then, I certainly won't be
telling you my dreams.

58
00:04:33,321 --> 00:04:40,001
I am his nephew. That means that my father,
John, was Alan's older brother.

59
00:04:40,801 --> 00:04:44,361
John and Alan were sons of the Empire.

60
00:04:46,001 --> 00:04:49,961
Their father, my grandfather,
was in the Indian civil service.

61
00:04:51,041 --> 00:04:55,721
When my father was four years old
and my grandmother is pregnant with Alan

62
00:04:55,761 --> 00:05:02,521
they're sent back to England
and are left with a foster family

63
00:05:02,561 --> 00:05:04,481
and they don't see their parents again

64
00:05:04,521 --> 00:05:07,561
until my grandfather has
his next bout of long leave

65
00:05:07,601 --> 00:05:10,161
which is going to be in several years' time.

66
00:05:11,241 --> 00:05:17,521
I mean, I suspect that some of the
eccentricities or perhaps being withdrawn

67
00:05:17,561 --> 00:05:24,561
or being able to disappear into his own world
could be attributed to some of that.

68
00:05:48,721 --> 00:05:54,801
We're in the archive of Sherborne School
and this is a photograph from 1926.

69
00:05:54,841 --> 00:06:00,801
Alan Turing, who was then 14,
is on the far left on the bottom row

70
00:06:01,321 --> 00:06:04,921
looking at the camera very intently
with great concentration.

71
00:06:04,961 --> 00:06:09,161
You almost wonder if he was thinking
about the camera and how it operated.

72
00:06:11,681 --> 00:06:14,281
These are reports on his mathematics.

73
00:06:14,321 --> 00:06:16,721
'He has considerable
powers of reasoning

74
00:06:16,761 --> 00:06:21,401
and should do well if he can quicken up
a little and improve his style.'

75
00:06:22,841 --> 00:06:29,721
His teachers didn't recognise they had
a tremendous mathematical genius in their midst.

76
00:06:32,641 --> 00:06:37,281
This is the log book of the
Sherborne School library.

77
00:06:38,481 --> 00:06:42,641
<i>We</i> see <i>that he</i> checked <i>out Alice In Wonder/and
and Through the Looking-Glass</i>

78
00:06:44,481 --> 00:06:47,441
on 11th of April 1930.

79
00:06:48,401 --> 00:06:50,361
Interestingly, there are three
books he took out that day.

80
00:06:50,401 --> 00:06:54,161
<i>Alice In Wonderland, Through the
Looking-Glass and The Game of Logic.</i>

81
00:06:57,961 --> 00:07:01,921
There's this wonderful picture
that his mother drew

82
00:07:01,961 --> 00:07:05,241
<i>called Hockey or Watching the Daisies grow.</i>

83
00:07:05,881 --> 00:07:08,921
And there is Alan with his hockey stick

84
00:07:08,961 --> 00:07:12,681
ignoring the game, bending over
and studying the daisies.

85
00:07:13,721 --> 00:07:18,241
I think he's a bit of a loner. I think
there's evidence of that from early on.

86
00:07:20,241 --> 00:07:25,481
Turing was not someone who thrived
in social situations with lots of other people.

87
00:07:27,761 --> 00:07:30,721
He was very athletic
but his sport of choice was running

88
00:07:30,761 --> 00:07:33,441
which is of course a very solitary sport.

89
00:07:36,321 --> 00:07:40,081
He had one very great friend
who was a boy named Christopher Morcom.

90
00:07:42,201 --> 00:07:46,881
Morcom was, I think, more important to Turing
than any other human being in his life.

91
00:07:49,201 --> 00:07:54,361
Turing was probably, in an adolescent way,
quite in love with him.

92
00:07:57,201 --> 00:08:00,481
I think, in a way,
it was a kind of hero worship.

93
00:08:00,521 --> 00:08:04,681
I think he did idolise him.
I think he worshipped him.

94
00:08:10,721 --> 00:08:13,041
There was someone I knew at school

95
00:08:13,841 --> 00:08:17,001
someone who didn't
at all approve of dirty talk.

96
00:08:19,281 --> 00:08:22,281
Once or twice I tried to shock him
but it didn't work out.

97
00:08:23,281 --> 00:08:25,641
What do you mean, it didn't work out?

98
00:08:26,361 --> 00:08:28,561
He didn't take the bait.

99
00:08:29,001 --> 00:08:31,961
He was just... above it.

100
00:08:35,201 --> 00:08:36,641
He made me want to be good.

101
00:08:38,001 --> 00:08:39,521
He was in a different house.

102
00:08:40,201 --> 00:08:43,081
And boys in different houses
weren't meant to fraternise.

103
00:08:43,121 --> 00:08:48,281
So I could only see him on Wednesdays
when we both happened to be in the library.

104
00:08:50,161 --> 00:08:53,321
He would make fun of me
for my sloppy handwriting

105
00:08:54,481 --> 00:08:57,481
for mistakes I made...
the careless errors.

106
00:08:59,481 --> 00:09:01,601
He made me want
to improve my standards.

107
00:09:03,001 --> 00:09:04,841
He was an example.

108
00:09:05,441 --> 00:09:07,281
He was a friend.

109
00:09:08,161 --> 00:09:10,241
I didn't care about his example.

110
00:09:10,681 --> 00:09:12,601
What did you care about?

111
00:09:15,201 --> 00:09:17,681
I cared about what I was in his eyes.

112
00:09:18,481 --> 00:09:21,641
More so, in a sense,
than what I was in my own.

113
00:09:30,881 --> 00:09:34,241
Morcom's influence on Turing
was absolutely enormous.

114
00:09:34,961 --> 00:09:38,161
His importance was very,
very profound and very deep

115
00:09:38,201 --> 00:09:40,441
both intellectually and emotionally.

116
00:09:41,561 --> 00:09:46,721
Christopher was a great scientist with
tremendous gifts and tremendous curiosity

117
00:09:46,761 --> 00:09:48,921
curiosity to match Turing's.

118
00:09:51,121 --> 00:09:53,281
So they would often stargaze together.

119
00:09:53,321 --> 00:09:55,481
They were both very
interested in astronomy.

120
00:09:58,121 --> 00:09:59,561
They were more than just pals.

121
00:09:59,601 --> 00:10:01,601
There was a great intimacy between them

122
00:10:01,641 --> 00:10:04,881
but a very innocent... it was
entirely innocent of sexuality.

123
00:10:06,481 --> 00:10:08,961
I think if you find a person like that

124
00:10:09,001 --> 00:10:11,161
and I don't think
everybody does find one

125
00:10:11,201 --> 00:10:13,521
in fact I think it's terribly rare

126
00:10:15,361 --> 00:10:17,521
then all you thought before

127
00:10:18,441 --> 00:10:23,001
all your plans for yourself,
you realise they were just filling a gap.

128
00:10:24,761 --> 00:10:28,441
It was just something for you to do
while you were waiting for this person

129
00:10:29,401 --> 00:10:35,441
and everything you want to be
is something for him, not yourself.

130
00:10:39,841 --> 00:10:41,841
There is a drawback, however.

131
00:10:43,361 --> 00:10:48,241
Finding such a person makes
everybody else appear so ordinary

132
00:10:49,761 --> 00:10:52,121
and if anything happens to him

133
00:10:53,921 --> 00:10:58,641
you've got nothing left
but to return to the ordinary world

134
00:11:01,001 --> 00:11:03,961
and a kind of isolation
that never existed before.

135
00:11:12,881 --> 00:11:16,361
At the beginning of December 1929

136
00:11:16,401 --> 00:11:22,721
Chris and Alan went together up to Cambridge
for the scholarship examinations.

137
00:11:22,761 --> 00:11:29,241
And at that time, they were both hoping that
they would succeed and obtain scholarships

138
00:11:29,281 --> 00:11:32,721
and go on to study together at Cambridge.

139
00:11:33,961 --> 00:11:36,641
It wasn't known, of course,
it couldn't be known

140
00:11:36,681 --> 00:11:38,561
to Alan or to Chris

141
00:11:38,601 --> 00:11:43,321
that shortly afterwards,
Alan was to lose his best friend.

142
00:11:45,841 --> 00:11:49,481
Chris died on the 13th of February 1930.

143
00:11:52,881 --> 00:11:55,801
One friend put it quite accurately

144
00:11:55,841 --> 00:11:59,561
when they said, 'poor old Turing
was absolutely bowled over'.

145
00:12:02,481 --> 00:12:05,681
Chris had contracted
tuberculosis as a child.

146
00:12:06,721 --> 00:12:10,041
He suffered from poor health
all his life but he never complained.

147
00:12:10,081 --> 00:12:12,001
He was very private that way.

148
00:12:13,321 --> 00:12:15,281
When I heard he was dead

149
00:12:16,601 --> 00:12:20,081
the world threatened
suddenly to be so different.

150
00:12:21,481 --> 00:12:25,761
I found ways of dragging him around
with me to ease the transition.

151
00:12:27,321 --> 00:12:30,401
I wrote to his mother
a number of times.

152
00:12:31,441 --> 00:12:34,321
I made no secret of
the power of my feelings.

153
00:12:34,361 --> 00:12:37,961
I told her I absolutely worshipped
the ground on which he walked

154
00:12:38,001 --> 00:12:41,681
and she, being his mother,
found no reason to quibble with this.

155
00:12:44,161 --> 00:12:46,241
We shared in the loss of him.

156
00:12:48,521 --> 00:12:50,881
I asked her for a snapshot
and she gave me one.

157
00:12:51,601 --> 00:12:53,081
I have it here.

158
00:12:56,321 --> 00:12:57,561
See?

159
00:13:04,361 --> 00:13:10,321
This is a letter from Alan to
my grandmother, Chris's mother

160
00:13:11,001 --> 00:13:14,321
dated the 20th of February 1930.

161
00:13:14,921 --> 00:13:17,761
He said, 'During the last year
I worked with him continually

162
00:13:17,801 --> 00:13:22,881
and I'm sure that I could not have found
anywhere another companion so brilliant

163
00:13:22,921 --> 00:13:25,321
and yet so charming and unconceited.

164
00:13:25,881 --> 00:13:29,961
<i>[Turing's voice] '/ regarded my interest in
my Work as something to be shared With him</i>

165
00:13:30,001 --> 00:13:32,801
<i>and I think he felt a little
the same about me.</i>

166
00:13:34,121 --> 00:13:38,001
<i>I know that I must put as much energy
into my Work as if he were alive</i>

167
00:13:38,041 --> 00:13:40,441
<i>because that is what
he would like me to do.</i>

168
00:13:40,481 --> 00:13:43,481
<i>Yours sincerely, Alan Turing.'</i>

169
00:13:46,441 --> 00:13:49,121
My mother was very
worried at the time

170
00:13:49,841 --> 00:13:53,441
because I insisted that
Morcom was still with me

171
00:13:55,041 --> 00:13:57,521
working with me, helping me.

172
00:13:59,321 --> 00:14:01,401
He was my companion

173
00:14:01,841 --> 00:14:07,881
and in some ways he was an even
steadier companion after his death.

174
00:14:09,121 --> 00:14:13,401
I didn't want to frighten anyone,
but I knew he was still there.

175
00:14:18,841 --> 00:14:22,681
After Chris's death,
Alan was determined to go to Cambridge

176
00:14:22,721 --> 00:14:27,721
and in fact Alan did end up
with a scholarship to King's College.

177
00:14:29,121 --> 00:14:33,001
Turing felt that there was unfinished work

178
00:14:33,041 --> 00:14:36,721
which Chris had started
and which he wanted to continue.

179
00:14:39,081 --> 00:14:42,961
It was while he was at Cambridge that
he wrote what would prove to be

180
00:14:43,001 --> 00:14:45,401
I think, one of the...

181
00:14:46,321 --> 00:14:49,601
seminal papers in mathematics
of the 20th century.

182
00:14:50,681 --> 00:14:53,601
I don't think anyone, Turing included

183
00:14:53,641 --> 00:14:58,921
was remotely aware of the significance
that this paper was going to have.

184
00:15:02,561 --> 00:15:06,641
It introduces the idea of the computer.

185
00:15:17,641 --> 00:15:20,041
Well, in my mind,
the reason Alan Turing is

186
00:15:20,081 --> 00:15:22,761
well, one of the greatest
scientists of the 20th century

187
00:15:22,801 --> 00:15:23,881
is this paper.

188
00:15:24,681 --> 00:15:28,801
All our modern computers,
from laptops to video games

189
00:15:28,841 --> 00:15:31,481
are exactly what he
laid out in this paper.

190
00:15:42,641 --> 00:15:46,281
When Turing did his early work on computers

191
00:15:46,321 --> 00:15:49,361
the word 'computer' didn't mean
a machine, as it does now.

192
00:15:49,401 --> 00:15:50,841
It meant a person.

193
00:15:50,881 --> 00:15:53,841
It meant a person who calculates,
who computes.

194
00:15:56,081 --> 00:16:00,321
Hundreds and hundreds of young women
with mechanical calculating machines in a room.

195
00:16:01,281 --> 00:16:05,441
And they would do little bits of calculation
and write the answers down on cards

196
00:16:05,481 --> 00:16:08,201
and pass them along
to the next person in line.

197
00:16:08,241 --> 00:16:14,761
And so Turing is clearly starting to think
'can we automate the whole thing?'

198
00:16:14,801 --> 00:16:17,121
And the answer he comes up with is 'yes!'

199
00:16:19,081 --> 00:16:22,641
He was working on a mathematics problem.

200
00:16:22,681 --> 00:16:27,041
Almost incidentally to
a solution of that problem

201
00:16:27,081 --> 00:16:32,121
he did a construction that
he called the universal machine.

202
00:16:35,761 --> 00:16:38,361
And what that construction did

203
00:16:38,401 --> 00:16:42,601
was just change the way people
thought about computation

204
00:16:42,641 --> 00:16:45,321
in a very fundamental way.

205
00:16:51,121 --> 00:16:54,161
<i>Turing's Universal Machine
was purely hypothetical</i>

206
00:16:54,201 --> 00:16:58,201
<i>but it laid out the fundamental principle
underpinning all computers -</i>

207
00:16:59,041 --> 00:17:03,161
<i>that any conceivable mathematical calculation
can be done by a single device</i>

208
00:17:03,201 --> 00:17:06,201
<i>shuffling ones and zeros back and forth.</i>

209
00:17:11,241 --> 00:17:15,601
This is a model of his theoretical machine
from this maths problem.

210
00:17:16,281 --> 00:17:20,601
And the way this works is, he said,
you'll have some kind of processing head

211
00:17:20,641 --> 00:17:23,441
which is basically what
the machine actually is.

212
00:17:23,481 --> 00:17:25,961
It would be looking at a tape.

213
00:17:26,001 --> 00:17:28,921
And so we've got here
a tape with symbols on it.

214
00:17:28,961 --> 00:17:31,841
And the machine would have instructions.

215
00:17:31,881 --> 00:17:35,281
So as it reads different symbols,
it can move the tape forward

216
00:17:35,321 --> 00:17:36,721
it can wind it back.

217
00:17:37,561 --> 00:17:41,201
And it could generally process
the information on the tape

218
00:17:47,321 --> 00:17:50,641
And part of Alan Turing's
genius was to realise

219
00:17:50,681 --> 00:17:54,681
that a machine like this can
compute absolutely anything

220
00:17:54,721 --> 00:17:57,481
because anything can be
written as ones and zeros.

221
00:18:01,121 --> 00:18:04,521
And this is the basis of all computers.

222
00:18:12,961 --> 00:18:16,361
And the introduction of the universal machine

223
00:18:16,401 --> 00:18:22,081
made up of apparently
absurdly simple components

224
00:18:22,121 --> 00:18:25,201
a strip of paper, a pencil

225
00:18:25,241 --> 00:18:28,201
a wheel to move the paper left and right

226
00:18:28,241 --> 00:18:30,961
a set of very simple instructions.

227
00:18:31,001 --> 00:18:38,201
These apparently trivial devices turn out
to have the most profound implications.

228
00:18:49,001 --> 00:18:51,601
I've got here a generic smart phone.

229
00:18:51,641 --> 00:18:57,841
And if you crack this open,
inside it in the centre here is the processor.

230
00:18:57,881 --> 00:19:03,881
So this chip here does exactly what
Alan Turing described this machine doing.

231
00:19:03,921 --> 00:19:07,801
And on the back of this I have
the memory, which is the tape.

232
00:19:07,841 --> 00:19:10,521
And again it's exactly
what Alan Turing described.

233
00:19:12,441 --> 00:19:16,161
<i>A single machine that can be
programmed to do virtually anything.</i>

234
00:19:16,681 --> 00:19:21,041
<i>In the coming years, it would be seen as
a moment of discovery, like Newton's apple.</i>

235
00:19:23,001 --> 00:19:25,921
<i>The digital age had begun.</i>

236
00:19:31,641 --> 00:19:35,401
People credit Turing with
the invention of the computer

237
00:19:35,441 --> 00:19:39,921
because he invented the concept
on which everything else was built.

238
00:19:40,721 --> 00:19:42,481
<i>[Archive footage narrator]
'In the electronics age</i>

239
00:19:42,521 --> 00:19:46,921
<i>the development of giant computers,
electronic brains, has been a key development...'</i>

240
00:19:48,001 --> 00:19:49,681
He writes something that is so original

241
00:19:49,721 --> 00:19:54,961
that you can't categorise it into any of the normal
mathematical categories that are around.

242
00:19:55,001 --> 00:19:57,441
He started something genuinely new.

243
00:20:16,161 --> 00:20:18,441
When you look back
at something like computers

244
00:20:18,481 --> 00:20:21,441
there's often a seed that
everything came from.

245
00:20:21,841 --> 00:20:26,321
Alan Turing was sort of at the top
of everything that ever developed

246
00:20:26,361 --> 00:20:29,481
all the future research that was done
by people building real equipment

247
00:20:29,521 --> 00:20:32,321
that can clink, clink, clink - compute!

248
00:20:36,081 --> 00:20:39,881
<i>One day ladies will be walking their
computers in the park and saying</i>

249
00:20:39,921 --> 00:20:44,241
<i>'do you know, my little computer said
a very funny thing to me this morning'.</i>

250
00:20:46,761 --> 00:20:51,121
We have universal Turing machines
in hardware in our homes

251
00:20:51,161 --> 00:20:55,321
and we use them for dozens
and dozens of different tasks.

252
00:21:00,041 --> 00:21:04,361
Very few parts of our modern life
aren't impacted by Turing's ideas.

253
00:21:05,521 --> 00:21:09,201
The things that he contributed
to computer science

254
00:21:09,241 --> 00:21:12,201
weren't the things that just happened
to be true in one particular year

255
00:21:12,241 --> 00:21:13,921
or in one particular decade.

256
00:21:13,961 --> 00:21:16,121
They're the things that
are fundamentally true.

257
00:21:16,161 --> 00:21:17,801
So they're always goings to be with us

258
00:21:17,841 --> 00:21:22,321
in the same way that the things Galileo
and Newton contributed to physics

259
00:21:22,361 --> 00:21:23,841
are always going to be with us.

260
00:21:32,841 --> 00:21:37,601
All our modern computing
grew from this one idea of Alan Turing's.

261
00:21:37,641 --> 00:21:39,281
Incredible.

262
00:21:42,561 --> 00:21:44,961
<i>But that would be the future.</i>

263
00:21:45,001 --> 00:21:49,761
<i>Back in 1939, Turing's brilliant visions
were interrupted by the shock of war.</i>

264
00:21:53,201 --> 00:21:56,121
In 1939, with the advent
of the Second World War

265
00:21:56,161 --> 00:22:00,361
Turing was recruited to be part of a team

266
00:22:00,401 --> 00:22:04,441
who were involved in the effort
to break German codes.

267
00:22:05,481 --> 00:22:09,841
The centre of operations for this
code-breaking effort was Bletchley Park

268
00:22:09,881 --> 00:22:15,601
which was a country estate,
equidistant from Cambridge and Oxford.

269
00:22:15,641 --> 00:22:18,321
And also very easily accessible from London.

270
00:22:22,121 --> 00:22:25,001
It was a completely secret effort.

271
00:22:26,001 --> 00:22:31,641
There's never been a place
where secrets were better kept

272
00:22:31,681 --> 00:22:33,921
than they were kept at Bletchley.

273
00:22:37,081 --> 00:22:40,601
We were on our honour not
to talk about this and we didn't.

274
00:22:40,641 --> 00:22:43,241
My parents never knew what I did
until the day they died.

275
00:22:44,681 --> 00:22:48,561
It was an extremely eccentric
bunch of people who were recruited.

276
00:22:48,601 --> 00:22:51,961
There were mathematicians.
There was a British chess champion.

277
00:22:52,001 --> 00:22:56,281
There were people who had won contests
to do crossword puzzles in a very, very fast time.

278
00:22:57,521 --> 00:23:03,201
Turing was, in some ways,
the main architect of the code-breaking effort.

279
00:23:03,241 --> 00:23:06,441
You needed exceptional talent

280
00:23:06,481 --> 00:23:11,321
you needed genius at Bletchley,
and Turing was the genius.

281
00:23:13,681 --> 00:23:19,001
I regarded him with a certain amount of awe
because he was 'The Prof'.

282
00:23:19,921 --> 00:23:22,921
He was just regarded as very clever.

283
00:23:27,041 --> 00:23:31,801
The Germans were coding their messages
using what was called an Enigma machine.

284
00:23:34,641 --> 00:23:39,441
What you have here is a
German Enigma machine

285
00:23:39,481 --> 00:23:41,681
developed in
World War II

286
00:23:41,721 --> 00:23:45,801
to encipher messages between
parts of the German forces.

287
00:23:50,641 --> 00:23:52,521
The whole point about the Enigma machine

288
00:23:52,561 --> 00:23:56,481
is it could be configured
in a large number of ways -

289
00:23:56,521 --> 00:23:59,921
15 million, million ways.

290
00:24:03,321 --> 00:24:06,081
The German operator set the machine up

291
00:24:07,001 --> 00:24:09,241
keyed the message in which scrambled it

292
00:24:10,681 --> 00:24:12,801
transmitted the scrambled text.

293
00:24:12,841 --> 00:24:17,801
The other intended recipient had a machine
set to exactly the same settings

294
00:24:17,841 --> 00:24:21,961
and that descrambled the message
and revealed the plain text.

295
00:24:24,721 --> 00:24:29,401
The Germans believed that this machine
was completely unbreakable.

296
00:24:34,441 --> 00:24:38,881
Turing sat down with an Enigma machine,
and he looked at it

297
00:24:38,921 --> 00:24:41,561
and he thought I can break that.

298
00:25:02,001 --> 00:25:03,681
I had a dream.

299
00:25:04,201 --> 00:25:05,761
Oh, good.

300
00:25:06,641 --> 00:25:08,361
I didn't write it down though.

301
00:25:09,121 --> 00:25:10,881
You should write them down.

302
00:25:13,321 --> 00:25:15,161
What did you dream about?

303
00:25:19,401 --> 00:25:21,721
I dreamt about Joan Clarke.

304
00:25:23,001 --> 00:25:26,481
We worked together. I can't say.

305
00:25:27,121 --> 00:25:28,841
Of course.

306
00:25:29,441 --> 00:25:31,361
But, we were...

307
00:25:32,841 --> 00:25:34,441
It was...

308
00:25:35,161 --> 00:25:37,321
There was a war on.

309
00:25:39,161 --> 00:25:42,001
I 'loved' her.

310
00:25:42,041 --> 00:25:45,681
Or rather - I didn't not love her.

311
00:25:48,281 --> 00:25:52,801
Joan Clarke was a rarity at Bletchley.

312
00:25:52,841 --> 00:26:04,201
She was a woman who did the same work
and had the same status as male codebreakers

313
00:26:04,241 --> 00:26:06,641
but she was probably paid less.

314
00:26:06,681 --> 00:26:08,881
She was a mathematician.

315
00:26:08,921 --> 00:26:13,281
It was known that
she and Turing had been close.

316
00:26:15,561 --> 00:26:17,721
Joan and I, we...

317
00:26:20,321 --> 00:26:21,681
we went to the pictures.

318
00:26:24,481 --> 00:26:27,121
One didn't have to speak differently to her.

319
00:26:27,721 --> 00:26:29,881
One could be amusing, have a laugh.

320
00:26:30,241 --> 00:26:31,641
One didn't have to pretend.

321
00:26:34,961 --> 00:26:37,521
Anyway, I thought that
if she was so sporting

322
00:26:37,561 --> 00:26:40,241
one might just as easily
imagine her as a wife.

323
00:26:41,121 --> 00:26:44,561
So I proposed marriage
and she immediately said 'yes'.

324
00:26:44,601 --> 00:26:47,721
And just to be as sporting with her
as she was with me

325
00:26:47,761 --> 00:26:50,401
I told her straight away that I fancied men.

326
00:26:50,961 --> 00:26:54,961
And... this didn't bother her a jot.

327
00:26:55,761 --> 00:26:58,521
At least she gave no outward sign.

328
00:27:00,521 --> 00:27:06,961
It was a surprise to me when he said,
I think his words probably were

329
00:27:08,201 --> 00:27:11,041
'Would you consider marrying me?'

330
00:27:11,401 --> 00:27:18,161
He told me that he had
this homosexual tendency

331
00:27:18,841 --> 00:27:24,721
and naturally that worried me a bit

332
00:27:24,761 --> 00:27:34,921
because I did know that was something
that was almost certainly permanent

333
00:27:35,681 --> 00:27:37,241
but...

334
00:27:39,721 --> 00:27:41,161
we carried on.

335
00:27:43,481 --> 00:27:46,841
Turing was doing something that was
fairly common at that time

336
00:27:46,881 --> 00:27:49,041
which was, he was
going to make an effort.

337
00:27:49,081 --> 00:27:52,601
He was going to make a
sort of stab at heterosexuality.

338
00:27:54,481 --> 00:27:59,401
What was interesting was that he never
even reached the phase of marrying her.

339
00:27:59,441 --> 00:28:02,361
He realised very quickly
that it was not going to work.

340
00:28:03,441 --> 00:28:06,641
Did you never tell her that
you acted on your desires?

341
00:28:06,681 --> 00:28:07,841
No.

342
00:28:07,881 --> 00:28:16,041
Joan and I, we were interested in
how mathematics expresses itself in nature.

343
00:28:18,241 --> 00:28:22,441
I thought our wonderful conversations
would be enough for both of us.

344
00:28:25,041 --> 00:28:28,001
But a moment came

345
00:28:29,161 --> 00:28:33,281
when you realised you would never
be able to be as honest with her

346
00:28:34,881 --> 00:28:36,641
as she was with you?

347
00:28:37,721 --> 00:28:39,121
Yes.

348
00:28:41,961 --> 00:28:44,521
So I called it off.

349
00:28:45,201 --> 00:28:47,161
I knew it would hurt her.

350
00:28:47,201 --> 00:28:51,241
But it would hurt her
less than years of deceit?

351
00:28:51,841 --> 00:28:53,081
Yes.

352
00:28:57,521 --> 00:29:01,161
Turing was such, in some ways,
such an honest person.

353
00:29:01,921 --> 00:29:06,841
Most would've married and either
led a sort of secret life with other men

354
00:29:06,881 --> 00:29:10,441
or eventually divorced their wives.

355
00:29:12,041 --> 00:29:16,041
And what this suggests to me was a much
higher degree of self-awareness

356
00:29:16,081 --> 00:29:19,361
than a lot of other men
of his generation had.

357
00:29:22,161 --> 00:29:27,641
I learnt nothing about
his homosexuality at Bletchley.

358
00:29:29,001 --> 00:29:32,481
Turing was a very eccentric person.

359
00:29:32,521 --> 00:29:39,641
He would wear a gas mask as he
went into work on his bicycle

360
00:29:39,681 --> 00:29:42,521
because he suffered from hay fever.

361
00:29:43,681 --> 00:29:48,601
He often went into work
with his pyjamas under his jacket.

362
00:29:50,441 --> 00:29:55,761
This is the most eccentric thing of all:
he couldn't trust the banks.

363
00:29:55,801 --> 00:30:00,921
He therefore decided
he would buy silver ingots.

364
00:30:01,401 --> 00:30:04,561
And he would plant them in the park.

365
00:30:05,161 --> 00:30:07,601
But he forgot where he had planted them.

366
00:30:07,641 --> 00:30:09,961
And they have never been found since.

367
00:30:11,681 --> 00:30:14,681
<i>For Turing, wartime Bletchley
was a paradise.</i>

368
00:30:15,241 --> 00:30:17,521
<i>It didn't matter if you were different.</i>

369
00:30:17,561 --> 00:30:20,041
<i>All that counted was
outwitting the Germans.</i>

370
00:30:26,601 --> 00:30:30,761
<i>The greatest threat to Britain's survival
was the war in the Atlantic.</i>

371
00:30:31,921 --> 00:30:36,521
Convoys were being attacked
by German naval U-boats.

372
00:30:42,161 --> 00:30:45,921
It mattered because we
depended on sea transport

373
00:30:45,961 --> 00:30:51,481
to get an enormous amount of supplies
into the United Kingdom for the war.

374
00:30:53,761 --> 00:30:58,201
Defeating of the U-boats was the most
important task we had to perform

375
00:30:58,241 --> 00:31:01,241
and without it we wouldn't have been
able to win the war at all.

376
00:31:04,441 --> 00:31:06,161
We knew how important it was

377
00:31:06,201 --> 00:31:09,681
and we knew also that
when we were not breaking

378
00:31:09,721 --> 00:31:12,161
what the consequences were.

379
00:31:14,121 --> 00:31:21,321
We had somehow or other
to break the U-boat codes.

380
00:31:27,721 --> 00:31:33,721
Turing considered that the major way
of attacking Enigma cyphers was with cribs.

381
00:31:34,641 --> 00:31:37,521
That is known plain text, in modern speak.

382
00:31:37,561 --> 00:31:41,241
And this is where you could
guess the German text

383
00:31:41,281 --> 00:31:44,161
which the operator
had keyed into the machine

384
00:31:44,201 --> 00:31:48,281
in order to get the cypher text,
which you have actually intercepted.

385
00:31:50,161 --> 00:31:54,161
A crib might be something so simple
as a word that would often occur

386
00:31:54,201 --> 00:31:55,481
such as the word 'weather'.

387
00:31:55,521 --> 00:31:57,881
The Germans always reported
to each other on the weather.

388
00:31:57,921 --> 00:32:02,121
So the word 'wetter' - W-E-T-T-E-R,
became a very useful crib.

389
00:32:07,801 --> 00:32:09,521
Time was of the essence.

390
00:32:09,561 --> 00:32:12,521
And the conceptual breakthrough
that Turing came up with

391
00:32:12,561 --> 00:32:17,601
was: well, if a machine is being used
to code these messages

392
00:32:18,201 --> 00:32:21,801
we need to build a machine
to break the code.

393
00:32:26,121 --> 00:32:30,161
<i>The machine, designed by Turing
and a colleague, Gordon Welchman</i>

394
00:32:30,201 --> 00:32:32,121
<i>was called The Bombe.</i>

395
00:32:38,121 --> 00:32:40,521
There were over 200 of these machines

396
00:32:40,561 --> 00:32:43,521
working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week

397
00:32:43,561 --> 00:32:47,001
looking for the settings on the
rotors of the Enigma machine.

398
00:32:50,961 --> 00:32:54,481
What the Bombe did
was to explore the relationships

399
00:32:55,641 --> 00:32:58,761
between the cipher text and the crib

400
00:32:58,801 --> 00:33:02,481
looking for the Enigma configuration.

401
00:33:07,001 --> 00:33:12,041
It would've taken people with pencil
and paper weeks to do that by hand.

402
00:33:12,081 --> 00:33:14,081
And the Bombe could do it
in a few minutes.

403
00:33:15,521 --> 00:33:20,201
Within a couple of years they were able
to read virtually all the Enigma traffic

404
00:33:20,241 --> 00:33:25,121
except for the traffic that
was pertaining to the Navy.

405
00:33:31,441 --> 00:33:33,121
The reason it was so difficult to crack

406
00:33:33,161 --> 00:33:36,601
was because the Enigma machine
used by the German Navy

407
00:33:36,641 --> 00:33:40,881
had even more permutations
that it put the letters through.

408
00:33:42,801 --> 00:33:48,161
Nobody had actually managed
to break the naval Enigma system

409
00:33:48,201 --> 00:33:51,761
and understand this extra level of complexity.

410
00:33:51,801 --> 00:33:54,841
And that was what Turing did.

411
00:34:04,961 --> 00:34:09,041
He realised that you could
actually use mathematics.

412
00:34:09,081 --> 00:34:12,241
That if you applied maths
to the codes and the ciphers

413
00:34:12,281 --> 00:34:15,721
then you could reduce the space
that had to be searched.

414
00:34:16,241 --> 00:34:21,201
You could then use the Bombe
to search those reduced spaces.

415
00:34:24,321 --> 00:34:27,801
He just took a large number of
messages which were intercepted

416
00:34:27,841 --> 00:34:31,841
and he sat down and played around
with these, pencil and paper

417
00:34:31,881 --> 00:34:33,561
and he worked it out.

418
00:34:40,681 --> 00:34:44,121
Suddenly, we could begin
to break the messages

419
00:34:44,161 --> 00:34:47,841
from the German high command
to U-boats in the North Atlantic

420
00:34:47,881 --> 00:34:49,961
and that was absolutely vital.

421
00:34:54,201 --> 00:34:57,161
We certainly couldn't have gone ahead
with D-Day when we did

422
00:34:57,201 --> 00:34:59,601
if we hadn't cracked naval Enigma.

423
00:35:11,321 --> 00:35:17,161
This ability to crack the code and thereby
read the German military traffic

424
00:35:17,201 --> 00:35:20,321
helped the allies strategically so much.

425
00:35:21,321 --> 00:35:25,241
Alan Turing's contribution
cannot be overstated.

426
00:35:26,481 --> 00:35:32,641
I think that Turing's own personal contribution
towards winning the war was crucial.

427
00:35:36,441 --> 00:35:38,481
At the end of the war

428
00:35:38,521 --> 00:35:41,521
we all left Bletchley without
being allowed, as it were

429
00:35:41,561 --> 00:35:45,161
to say anything about
what we'd been doing

430
00:35:45,201 --> 00:35:47,121
which I think was a very great mistake.

431
00:35:47,161 --> 00:35:48,881
I think we could've said more.

432
00:35:51,241 --> 00:35:56,881
Turing's contribution was virtually
unknown during his lifetime.

433
00:35:56,921 --> 00:36:03,281
And in fact, it took quite a few years after
his death before it eventually emerged.

434
00:36:04,561 --> 00:36:12,001
Somehow the step of recognising and
acknowledging and thanking him was skipped.

435
00:36:12,841 --> 00:36:16,641
He was treated abysmally
by his own government.

436
00:36:26,281 --> 00:36:29,881
<i>By the time the war had ended,
a new age had already begun.</i>

437
00:36:29,921 --> 00:36:31,761
<i>The computer age.</i>

438
00:36:31,801 --> 00:36:34,761
<i>And Alan Turing was at the heart of it.</i>

439
00:36:35,681 --> 00:36:39,841
<i>In 1945, he designed one of
the world 's first computers.</i>

440
00:36:41,001 --> 00:36:46,641
<i>The theoretical ideas he'd laid out
in his 1936 paper had become reality.</i>

441
00:36:48,681 --> 00:36:50,521
[Archive footage narrator]
'Manchester University

442
00:36:50,561 --> 00:36:52,681
<i>where anyone who
urgently wishes to know</i>

443
00:36:52,721 --> 00:36:57,161
<i>Whether 2 to power of 127 minus 1
is a prime number or not</i>

444
00:36:57,201 --> 00:37:01,281
<i>can be given the answer
by an electronic brain in 25 minutes</i>

445
00:37:01,321 --> 00:37:04,121
<i>instead of by a human brain in 6 months...'</i>

446
00:37:04,361 --> 00:37:08,881
<i>in 1948, Turing joined the mathematics
department at Manchester University</i>

447
00:37:09,361 --> 00:37:11,641
<i>to work in a new computer lab.</i>

448
00:37:14,001 --> 00:37:17,241
Computers had only just been invented.

449
00:37:17,281 --> 00:37:23,441
The prototype computer
was built here in Manchester

450
00:37:23,481 --> 00:37:27,881
and it ran its first program in June 1948.

451
00:37:29,041 --> 00:37:34,881
It was early years in the era
of using computers.

452
00:37:34,921 --> 00:37:37,561
<i>[Archive footage narrator] 'The</i> brain <i>at
present is only in the experimental stage.</i>

453
00:37:37,601 --> 00:37:40,521
<i>The answer being read
from a cathode ray tube.'</i>

454
00:37:41,041 --> 00:37:43,401
<i>Though by our standards
these computers are primitive</i>

455
00:37:44,281 --> 00:37:47,761
<i>they sparked an extraordinary
idea in Turing's mind.</i>

456
00:37:48,601 --> 00:37:53,681
After a while, he started to wonder,
could a computer ever be truly intelligent?

457
00:37:53,721 --> 00:37:58,201
Can machines really think?
Even the scientists argue that one.

458
00:38:00,641 --> 00:38:04,201
He's obviously realised the
potential power of these machines.

459
00:38:04,241 --> 00:38:10,441
He can see where they're going and
he's tackling a basic philosophical question.

460
00:38:11,681 --> 00:38:13,761
Can a machine think?

461
00:38:15,561 --> 00:38:17,641
Why can't something
of a person remain alive?

462
00:38:21,121 --> 00:38:22,241
I'm not mad.

463
00:38:22,281 --> 00:38:27,041
I don't believe an individual consciousness
could be transplanted into a machine now

464
00:38:27,081 --> 00:38:29,361
though given a few years, who knows?

465
00:38:29,401 --> 00:38:31,401
But for now I only ask

466
00:38:31,441 --> 00:38:37,281
can we not house something like a human
consciousness inside an inorganic vessel

467
00:38:37,801 --> 00:38:42,321
something permanent,
so it will remain and learn

468
00:38:42,361 --> 00:38:47,401
and achieve something like wisdom,
a wisdom to which you and I can refer?

469
00:38:48,641 --> 00:38:50,961
Would it ease your grief
over Christopher Morcom?

470
00:38:52,441 --> 00:38:55,041
The creation of this machine of yours.

471
00:38:56,521 --> 00:39:01,481
No, no, yes, but not in the way you think.

472
00:39:01,521 --> 00:39:06,961
Not because I myself could vindicate Chris's
mortality by creating another intelligence.

473
00:39:07,001 --> 00:39:10,601
It wouldn't be Chris after all, so how
could it possibly provide any relief?

474
00:39:10,641 --> 00:39:11,721
No.

475
00:39:11,761 --> 00:39:17,081
But because it would show Chris
his living hadn't been in vain.

476
00:39:18,481 --> 00:39:20,961
That he would have inspired me
to create something

477
00:39:21,001 --> 00:39:23,881
an intelligence, not his,
but in his name.

478
00:39:24,961 --> 00:39:27,161
Something that would never die.

479
00:39:28,761 --> 00:39:30,121
There's no question
but that Alan Turing

480
00:39:30,161 --> 00:39:33,161
was the real father of AI

481
00:39:33,201 --> 00:39:34,681
of Artificial Intelligence.

482
00:39:34,721 --> 00:39:39,481
He was already making the argument that
there could be such a thing as a thinking machine

483
00:39:39,521 --> 00:39:41,721
an intelligent machine.

484
00:39:47,081 --> 00:39:52,401
Towards the end of 1950, Alan Turing
published a remarkable essay.

485
00:39:52,441 --> 00:39:58,041
And in this essay, Alan Turing
argued that it was possible

486
00:39:58,081 --> 00:40:05,081
to work out whether
machines possess intelligence.

487
00:40:06,681 --> 00:40:14,161
Turing's basic idea is that if you're
trying to decide whether something is intelligent

488
00:40:14,201 --> 00:40:21,081
it doesn't matter what's going on inside,
all that matters is the output.

489
00:40:23,761 --> 00:40:28,961
His idea was that computers,
if they can pretend to be intelligent

490
00:40:29,001 --> 00:40:31,481
then we may as well
consider them intelligent.

491
00:40:31,521 --> 00:40:35,001
He realises there's a whole world of
philosophical debates and arguments

492
00:40:35,041 --> 00:40:36,961
about what is and isn't consciousness.

493
00:40:38,201 --> 00:40:39,401
Frankly, he said

494
00:40:39,441 --> 00:40:45,081
if computer can convince you
it's acting intelligently, who's to say it's not?

495
00:40:46,521 --> 00:40:51,121
Turing proposed something
he called the Imitation Game.

496
00:40:52,201 --> 00:40:58,681
He imagines a machine
and a human and a judge.

497
00:40:59,161 --> 00:41:04,521
If a machine can convince
the judge that it's a human

498
00:41:04,561 --> 00:41:08,121
the machine should be
judged to be intelligent.

499
00:41:09,081 --> 00:41:11,521
That's the Turing Test.

500
00:41:12,601 --> 00:41:16,041
Turing is one of the great
original thinkers of the 20th century.

501
00:41:17,361 --> 00:41:19,921
He seemed to be able to see further.

502
00:41:20,401 --> 00:41:25,001
You get a feeling when you read his work
that his mind is way out in front.

503
00:41:26,921 --> 00:41:32,201
<i>Until now Turing's work had been secret,
or comprehensible only to mathematicians.</i>

504
00:41:33,361 --> 00:41:37,601
<i>But his ideas on artificial intelligence
caught the public imagination.</i>

505
00:41:37,921 --> 00:41:40,401
<i>He was now being quoted
in the national press.</i>

506
00:41:42,441 --> 00:41:45,001
<i>[Turing's voice]</i>
' <i>This is only</i> a <i>fore taste of what is to come</i>

507
00:41:45,041 --> 00:41:47,321
<i>and only the shadow of what is to be</i>

508
00:41:47,361 --> 00:41:50,521
<i>but I do not see why it should not
enter any one of the fields</i>

509
00:41:50,561 --> 00:41:53,081
<i>normally covered by the human intellect</i>

510
00:41:53,121 --> 00:41:55,521
<i>and eventually compete on equal terms.</i>

511
00:41:55,561 --> 00:41:58,361
<i>I do not think you can even
draw the line at sonnets</i>

512
00:41:58,401 --> 00:42:00,881
<i>though the comparison
is perhaps a little bit unfair</i>

513
00:42:00,921 --> 00:42:06,761
<i>because a sonnet written by a machine
would be better appreciated by another machine.</i>

514
00:42:09,001 --> 00:42:13,761
Turing was attempting to
demystify the idea

515
00:42:13,801 --> 00:42:19,041
that human beings have a sort of
exclusive ability to experience emotion

516
00:42:19,081 --> 00:42:21,641
to experience pleasure,
to experience pain.

517
00:42:22,601 --> 00:42:24,321
Very, very controversial thing to say

518
00:42:24,361 --> 00:42:30,921
because it was in effect taking mankind off
the pedestal that mankind had put itself on.

519
00:42:34,161 --> 00:42:40,721
The idea that robots and computers
challenge us with

520
00:42:40,761 --> 00:42:44,681
is their ability to imitate what we do

521
00:42:44,721 --> 00:42:49,161
and therefore it becomes more and more
difficult to tell the difference.

522
00:42:53,241 --> 00:42:58,881
What Turing's argument did was
to give computer designers ambition

523
00:42:58,921 --> 00:43:05,201
and everyone else a sense of the scope
and scale of what might well happen.

524
00:43:05,241 --> 00:43:11,121
Because, what he understood from his
wartime work and his work in the later 1940s

525
00:43:11,161 --> 00:43:16,681
was that it would be possible to make
systems of machines of unimaginable scale.

526
00:43:19,441 --> 00:43:22,521
They would develop,
they would have experience

527
00:43:22,561 --> 00:43:26,881
they would have careers and in a
very interesting way they would have lives.

528
00:43:29,841 --> 00:43:37,521
And that mixture of ambition and clarity, I think,
is one of Turing's greatest legacies to modernity.

529
00:43:42,761 --> 00:43:47,041
<i>Turing's ideas on artificial intelligence
established him as a visionary scientist</i>

530
00:43:47,641 --> 00:43:50,081
<i>but there was more to his life.</i>

531
00:43:57,481 --> 00:44:03,881
By the 1950s, Alan was in one sense
an ivory tower intellectual

532
00:44:03,921 --> 00:44:08,881
but in another sense he, you know,
he lived, occasionally at least, on the streets.

533
00:44:14,161 --> 00:44:19,081
In many parts of Manchester,
there were cruising areas for gay men

534
00:44:19,121 --> 00:44:23,481
where people could meet other men
from all classes and situations.

535
00:44:28,881 --> 00:44:34,361
For someone like Alan,
entering the gay scene, the queer world

536
00:44:34,401 --> 00:44:37,641
must have been intensely thrilling.

537
00:44:42,961 --> 00:44:46,961
Surrounding all this of course
was the threat of the law

538
00:44:47,001 --> 00:44:51,041
because male homosexuality
was totally illegal

539
00:44:51,081 --> 00:44:53,361
whether in public or in private.

540
00:44:56,121 --> 00:45:01,641
Turing, at a certain point in Manchester,
met a young man named Arnold Murray.

541
00:45:01,681 --> 00:45:07,401
Meeting Murray started this chain of
misfortunes that eventually led to his arrest.

542
00:45:15,241 --> 00:45:17,081
So what happened?

543
00:45:19,241 --> 00:45:24,521
I met a young man - Arnold Murray -
in Manchester. On the Oxford Road.

544
00:45:26,321 --> 00:45:28,961
He looked hungry,
so I bought him a meal.

545
00:45:29,961 --> 00:45:35,121
I gave him my address and later
he came to my home to see me.

546
00:45:35,161 --> 00:45:37,201
He spent the night.

547
00:45:37,801 --> 00:45:39,281
He was 19.

548
00:45:42,361 --> 00:45:46,601
He didn't have a privileged upbringing
but he has aspirations.

549
00:45:50,321 --> 00:45:53,001
I know in a sense he brought me down

550
00:45:55,121 --> 00:45:57,721
but I feel sorry because
I brought him down as well.

551
00:46:01,761 --> 00:46:06,321
I think Turing, like many other
men of his generation

552
00:46:06,361 --> 00:46:08,241
would've felt they were living on the edge.

553
00:46:08,281 --> 00:46:09,881
Not all the time

554
00:46:09,921 --> 00:46:17,001
but were aware that one step into the wrong
direction could push them over the edge.

555
00:46:20,201 --> 00:46:22,641
He would've been aware of the risk.

556
00:46:22,681 --> 00:46:26,681
Perhaps he wasn't entirely surprised
when disaster struck.

557
00:46:28,841 --> 00:46:31,161
I think he stole from me.

558
00:46:31,201 --> 00:46:34,321
A few pounds,
but I couldn't be certain.

559
00:46:35,201 --> 00:46:39,481
I accused him. He became angry.
I weakened.

560
00:46:39,521 --> 00:46:41,561
He spent the night again.

561
00:46:41,601 --> 00:46:44,681
This theme repeated itself
throughout our acquaintance.

562
00:46:45,161 --> 00:46:48,961
And then one day I came home
and found I'd been burgled.

563
00:46:53,041 --> 00:46:56,761
Alan invites this young man into his home.

564
00:46:56,801 --> 00:47:02,721
And the result of this encounter
or series of encounters

565
00:47:02,761 --> 00:47:06,841
is that my grandfather's pocket watch

566
00:47:06,881 --> 00:47:13,841
which was given to Alan
as a very special gift, was stolen.

567
00:47:14,641 --> 00:47:17,321
So I confronted Arnold.

568
00:47:18,521 --> 00:47:22,761
I believed him when he said
he'd had nothing to do with it himself.

569
00:47:22,801 --> 00:47:25,961
He'd been chatting
to a friend of his

570
00:47:26,001 --> 00:47:27,641
Harry, who was a proper renter

571
00:47:27,681 --> 00:47:32,001
not like Arnold,
who appreciated favours

572
00:47:32,041 --> 00:47:37,241
but would absolutely accept no cash
unless it was dressed up as a loan.

573
00:47:38,601 --> 00:47:44,241
Anyway, this Harry, he'd seen a letter
Arnold was posting to me.

574
00:47:44,281 --> 00:47:45,921
He'd seen my address.

575
00:47:45,961 --> 00:47:48,241
Arnold talked to him about me,

576
00:47:48,281 --> 00:47:51,641
told him that I worked
on the electronic brain.

577
00:47:52,281 --> 00:47:57,121
And this must have suggested privilege.

578
00:47:59,601 --> 00:48:04,281
So Harry concocted this
burglary in Arnold's company

579
00:48:04,321 --> 00:48:07,881
but Arnold did nothing
to warn me about it.

580
00:48:08,881 --> 00:48:11,761
In his defence, when I confronted him,
he spilled everything.

581
00:48:19,681 --> 00:48:22,121
Turing was such an honest person

582
00:48:22,161 --> 00:48:24,961
and he was so much
the opposite of calculating

583
00:48:25,001 --> 00:48:27,761
he was not Machiavellian in the least.

584
00:48:28,601 --> 00:48:29,961
He'd been robbed.

585
00:48:30,001 --> 00:48:32,321
When you're robbed you go to the police.

586
00:48:32,361 --> 00:48:34,881
He was naive, in a lot of ways.

587
00:48:35,401 --> 00:48:40,161
He had faith that the
system would protect him

588
00:48:41,281 --> 00:48:45,001
and that turned out to be a
disastrous misstep on his part.

589
00:48:46,481 --> 00:48:49,681
And of course the police then discover
that they'd hit the jackpot.

590
00:48:49,721 --> 00:48:52,601
They'd discovered that he had
a young man in his house

591
00:48:52,641 --> 00:48:55,641
and there couldn't be any sensible
reason for him being there

592
00:48:55,681 --> 00:48:58,881
other than something
which was criminal, disgusting

593
00:48:58,921 --> 00:49:02,881
and, you know, possibly a security risk.

594
00:49:07,841 --> 00:49:10,801
The police didn't care about the robbery.

595
00:49:12,001 --> 00:49:17,601
The police were much more interested
in arresting a professor

596
00:49:17,641 --> 00:49:20,201
on charges of gross indecency.

597
00:49:24,681 --> 00:49:27,721
So what did you say to the police?

598
00:49:29,241 --> 00:49:31,321
I told them everything.

599
00:49:31,841 --> 00:49:34,721
I told them I'd been having
an affair with Arnold Murray

600
00:49:34,761 --> 00:49:37,481
and that he'd given my
address to a young man

601
00:49:37,521 --> 00:49:40,361
who was known to burgle
men he'd met for sex.

602
00:49:40,721 --> 00:49:43,721
And you told the police
that you had sex with Murray?

603
00:49:44,081 --> 00:49:46,481
They asked me what we got up to.

604
00:49:46,521 --> 00:49:52,441
I told them we engaged in mutual masturbation,
soixante-neuf, and inter-genital friction.

605
00:49:53,121 --> 00:49:54,841
Soixante-neuf?

606
00:49:55,361 --> 00:49:57,041
Sixty nine.

607
00:49:57,081 --> 00:49:59,281
Yes I know what it means.

608
00:49:59,841 --> 00:50:02,641
I was just wondering,
why you would say that to the police?

609
00:50:03,201 --> 00:50:05,481
I told you. I revealed everything.

610
00:50:05,841 --> 00:50:07,561
I was wondering

611
00:50:08,441 --> 00:50:12,721
if you cloaked it in elitist language
to keep the police in their place.

612
00:50:13,121 --> 00:50:16,241
They're unlikely to speak French,
aren't they, the police.

613
00:50:17,641 --> 00:50:23,761
To say that they may be the foot soldiers
that are out there to enforce the law

614
00:50:23,801 --> 00:50:27,841
but you, who speak French,
are amongst the lawmakers

615
00:50:27,881 --> 00:50:34,801
the politicians, the inventors,
the forgers of new paths.

616
00:50:34,841 --> 00:50:39,801
I wanted my watch back,
my father's watch.

617
00:50:40,481 --> 00:50:42,321
I wanted them to do their job.

618
00:50:43,841 --> 00:50:46,361
But as soon as they knew
you were a sodomite

619
00:50:46,401 --> 00:50:49,281
you gave up your right
to command them.

620
00:50:51,161 --> 00:50:52,561
You became their prey.

621
00:50:52,601 --> 00:50:54,961
I didn't go down for sodomy.

622
00:50:55,001 --> 00:50:58,681
I'm sorry, I thought you
practised sodomy with Murray?

623
00:50:58,721 --> 00:51:03,001
For God's sake, would you stop saying
'practised sodomy' as if it were the bloody piano.

624
00:51:03,041 --> 00:51:04,441
And the charge was not buggery

625
00:51:04,481 --> 00:51:09,641
it was 'Gross indecency contrary to Section 11
of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885'.

626
00:51:09,681 --> 00:51:12,401
It was the same law
that convicted Oscar Wilde.

627
00:51:14,121 --> 00:51:16,681
It's good to know things are moving forwards.

628
00:51:17,161 --> 00:51:18,601
You're right, by the way.

629
00:51:19,241 --> 00:51:23,121
As soon as they learned I was a homosexual
the burglary more or less vanished.

630
00:51:25,401 --> 00:51:27,561
One of them actually said to me

631
00:51:27,601 --> 00:51:33,321
'if you consort with naughty people,
naughty things are bound to happen'.

632
00:51:33,361 --> 00:51:35,281
As if by having sex with another man

633
00:51:35,321 --> 00:51:39,441
it was fit and proper that burglary
should follow close on its heels.

634
00:51:49,561 --> 00:51:51,441
[Turing's voice]
Dear Norman

635
00:51:51,481 --> 00:51:53,721
<i>I've now got myself into the kind of trouble</i>

636
00:51:53,761 --> 00:51:56,921
<i>that I have always considered
to be quite a possibility for me</i>

637
00:51:56,961 --> 00:52:00,401
<i>though I have usually rated it
at about 10 to 1 against.</i>

638
00:52:00,881 --> 00:52:05,241
<i>I shall shortly be pleading guilty to a
charge of sexual offenses with a young man.</i>

639
00:52:05,841 --> 00:52:10,201
<i>The story of how it all came to be found out
is a long and fascinating one.</i>

640
00:52:10,681 --> 00:52:13,321
<i>No doubt I shall emerge
from it all a different man</i>

641
00:52:14,121 --> 00:52:16,721
<i>but quite who I've not found out.</i>

642
00:52:17,681 --> 00:52:21,481
<i>Yours in distress, Alan.'</i>

643
00:52:25,721 --> 00:52:31,281
<i>In March 1952, Alan Turing
was convicted of Gross indecency.</i>

644
00:52:31,321 --> 00:52:35,041
<i>He'd become well enough known
for it to be a public disgrace.</i>

645
00:52:39,921 --> 00:52:44,601
What the court ordered was effectively
to have Turing chemically castrated.

646
00:52:44,641 --> 00:52:50,481
That was to effectively remove his body
of the male hormone testosterone.

647
00:52:54,201 --> 00:52:59,521
He's given a choice. He could go to jail
or he could agree to this treatment.

648
00:52:59,561 --> 00:53:05,401
He chose the so-called organo therapy
which amounted to chemical castration.

649
00:53:08,881 --> 00:53:13,521
Turing was probably given a drug
that we now know as stilboestrol.

650
00:53:15,001 --> 00:53:19,921
That is a synthetic version of the
female sex hormone, oestrogen.

651
00:53:21,561 --> 00:53:23,961
He had to attend the
Manchester Royal Infirmary

652
00:53:24,001 --> 00:53:26,721
on a monthly basis
for the first 9 months.

653
00:53:28,521 --> 00:53:31,161
He had to take daily tablets

654
00:53:31,201 --> 00:53:35,681
and then for the final <i>3</i> months
an implant was put into his thigh.

655
00:53:37,641 --> 00:53:39,761
'Chemical castration' they call it.

656
00:53:39,801 --> 00:53:41,321
Very civilised.

657
00:53:42,801 --> 00:53:47,241
I take it every day and once a month
I get tested at the hospital

658
00:53:47,281 --> 00:53:50,961
to make sure I don't have any of that
naughty testosterone in my blood.

659
00:53:53,641 --> 00:53:56,361
It's meant to cure me of my desires.

660
00:53:59,681 --> 00:54:02,801
The kinds of the things that Alan Turing
would have experienced

661
00:54:02,841 --> 00:54:06,721
would have been an
immediate change in his libido

662
00:54:06,761 --> 00:54:10,081
his inability to get an erection.
He would have become impotent.

663
00:54:10,121 --> 00:54:12,721
His testicles would have shrunken in size.

664
00:54:12,761 --> 00:54:14,721
He would've stopped shaving.

665
00:54:14,761 --> 00:54:17,161
Over time, he would've grown breasts.

666
00:54:17,201 --> 00:54:22,641
And that would have been the distinctive signature
of somebody who was chemically castrated.

667
00:54:27,121 --> 00:54:30,441
He was told the effects
of the treatment were reversible

668
00:54:30,481 --> 00:54:34,401
and no doubt that was part
of the reason he agreed to it.

669
00:54:38,681 --> 00:54:41,921
The arrest was, I think,
a turning point in his life

670
00:54:41,961 --> 00:54:45,721
because it was at that moment
that for the first time

671
00:54:45,761 --> 00:54:52,361
he understood how untrustworthy
British society was

672
00:54:52,401 --> 00:54:55,641
and the he was very, very expendable.

673
00:54:59,241 --> 00:55:03,721
I think it was a demoralising experience
and embittering experience for him.

674
00:55:03,761 --> 00:55:06,081
And he was never the same afterwards.

675
00:55:08,921 --> 00:55:17,881
I mean what's going on, partly, in the
insupportable tragedy of Turing's fate

676
00:55:17,921 --> 00:55:23,881
is what happens when
deeply institutionalised English intellectuals

677
00:55:23,921 --> 00:55:27,161
encounter what life's like
outside the walls.

678
00:55:28,201 --> 00:55:34,081
They forget and cannot imagine
how evil and vicious life can be.

679
00:55:43,601 --> 00:55:45,721
<i>Spring, 1953.</i>

680
00:55:45,761 --> 00:55:49,721
<i>Alan Turing had been visiting
Dr Greenbaum for six months.</i>

681
00:55:52,561 --> 00:55:59,121
For some mad reason the number of petals
on most flowers is a Fibonacci number.

682
00:56:01,641 --> 00:56:04,801
Each number the sum
of the previous two, yes?

683
00:56:05,921 --> 00:56:10,641
1,1, 2, 3, 5, 8,13, 21, 34...

684
00:56:11,681 --> 00:56:12,481
So...

685
00:56:12,521 --> 00:56:17,321
Our father was very interested
with everything that Turing was doing.

686
00:56:17,881 --> 00:56:20,881
I think he recognised a genius.

687
00:56:20,921 --> 00:56:27,481
And in talking and sharing ideas,
it must have been fascinating for him.

688
00:56:28,761 --> 00:56:31,481
Cells don't have a mind of their own.

689
00:56:32,641 --> 00:56:35,521
But a clump of cells will split

690
00:56:35,561 --> 00:56:40,521
and eventually some of the cells
will become the backbone of a bird

691
00:56:40,561 --> 00:56:43,481
and some of the others
will become its wings.

692
00:56:43,521 --> 00:56:48,841
But how do the individual cells know
what part of the organism to become?

693
00:56:50,721 --> 00:56:54,521
So I asked myself whether there might be
some mathematical underpinning

694
00:56:54,561 --> 00:56:57,241
to patterns that occur in nature...

695
00:56:57,681 --> 00:57:02,401
like the spots on a cow
or the petals on this daisy.

696
00:57:07,761 --> 00:57:10,681
<i>Turing had been working on
a revolutionary idea</i>

697
00:57:10,721 --> 00:57:15,521
<i>that mathematics can in principle describe
a process called morphogenesis</i>

698
00:57:15,561 --> 00:57:20,561
<i>the way shapes and patterns emerge
in living organisms as they develop.</i>

699
00:57:22,761 --> 00:57:25,801
After the war, Turing got interested in biology.

700
00:57:25,841 --> 00:57:29,281
He got interested in plants,
and the patterns in plants.

701
00:57:29,321 --> 00:57:32,321
He was also interested in markings on animals.

702
00:57:32,361 --> 00:57:34,841
Why are tigers striped,
leopards have spots?

703
00:57:35,361 --> 00:57:39,801
And the idea that there could be
a mathematical theory of stripes and spots

704
00:57:39,841 --> 00:57:42,601
was something that biologists
just hadn't really thought about.

705
00:57:42,641 --> 00:57:45,081
And for that matter,
neither had the mathematicians.

706
00:57:45,121 --> 00:57:48,001
People did not put
those two things together.

707
00:57:49,041 --> 00:57:53,521
So Turing was right out on the forefront
of mathematical biology

708
00:57:53,561 --> 00:57:55,361
that's now become very important.

709
00:57:59,761 --> 00:58:02,841
What he did, he came up with
a mathematical equation

710
00:58:02,881 --> 00:58:05,921
that described how the patterns formed.

711
00:58:15,001 --> 00:58:19,441
If you look at tropical fish you'll see that
there are spots, there are stripes...

712
00:58:19,481 --> 00:58:21,561
How does that actually come about?

713
00:58:21,601 --> 00:58:26,641
And Alan Turing, in the early 1950s,
really began to attack this problem.

714
00:58:26,681 --> 00:58:32,161
And the way in which he approached this
was from a very pure mathematical point of view.

715
00:58:34,201 --> 00:58:38,801
<i>This equation shows that chemicals
following incredibly simple mathematical rules</i>

716
00:58:38,841 --> 00:58:44,001
<i>can, in principle, spontaneously create
the markings on living creatures.</i>

717
00:58:54,481 --> 00:58:57,761
It's such an interesting equation
because it looks very simple...

718
00:58:57,801 --> 00:59:01,161
it doesn't sort of scream
stripes or spots at you.

719
00:59:01,201 --> 00:59:03,081
But as soon as you
start thinking about it

720
00:59:03,121 --> 00:59:05,361
certainly when Turing
started thinking about it

721
00:59:05,401 --> 00:59:09,081
he had had this big insight
that patterns are going to form.

722
00:59:19,721 --> 00:59:22,441
The rules are not just put black here,
put white there

723
00:59:22,481 --> 00:59:24,401
put black here, put white there

724
00:59:24,441 --> 00:59:27,921
they are not paint zebra by numbers rules.

725
00:59:27,961 --> 00:59:30,601
There are just a naturally running
mathematical system

726
00:59:30,641 --> 00:59:33,001
which by some beautiful feature
of the mathematics

727
00:59:33,041 --> 00:59:37,161
you crank the handle on the mathematics
and out comes the stripes or the spots.

728
00:59:42,841 --> 00:59:47,521
One of the first areas
in which he applied this

729
00:59:47,561 --> 00:59:53,001
was to explain the black
and white dappling on cows

730
00:59:53,041 --> 00:59:55,961
and he published a famous paper

731
00:59:56,001 --> 01:00:00,481
his morphogenesis paper, explaining that.

732
01:00:08,001 --> 01:00:12,761
You can even draw some sort of parallel
between what Turing did for nature

733
01:00:12,801 --> 01:00:14,321
and what he did in Bletchley Park.

734
01:00:15,441 --> 01:00:17,721
Turing is decoding nature.

735
01:00:22,681 --> 01:00:28,161
He had an almost physical feeling for how
those equations moved and played together.

736
01:00:28,761 --> 01:00:33,241
And probably the closest analogy for me
is of a composer.

737
01:00:33,281 --> 01:00:35,961
Turing is a little bit like Mozart.

738
01:00:36,001 --> 01:00:41,601
He could hear the whole glorious structure
of it somewhere inside his head.

739
01:00:50,441 --> 01:00:56,321
Turing really set the scene for a lot
of science that is now going on

740
01:00:56,361 --> 01:01:00,121
50 or 60 years after he started this work.

741
01:01:01,401 --> 01:01:03,961
I don't expect you to read my paper

742
01:01:04,001 --> 01:01:08,201
as fascinated as you appear to be
in the activities of my imagination.

743
01:01:09,121 --> 01:01:14,521
To me, morphogenesis is a giant
beautiful mathematical dream

744
01:01:14,561 --> 01:01:22,481
but to you - I think it would just appear
a series of scary mathematical functions.

745
01:01:29,521 --> 01:01:32,681
In a funny way, he had returned
to where he started intellectually.

746
01:01:32,721 --> 01:01:39,601
When he was a boy at Sherborne,
he was very interested in botany and biology.

747
01:01:40,521 --> 01:01:43,081
There's of course that famous image of him

748
01:01:43,121 --> 01:01:46,321
during the hockey game -
watching the daisies grow.

749
01:01:46,361 --> 01:01:51,361
Turing effectively came full circle
and returned to that period in his youth.

750
01:01:56,241 --> 01:02:01,121
<i>As their sessions continued,
Greenbaum saw Turing not just as a patient</i>

751
01:02:01,161 --> 01:02:03,361
<i>but also as a friend.</i>

752
01:02:05,161 --> 01:02:11,281
I think the empathy that he developed
with Alan Turing was very much that.

753
01:02:11,321 --> 01:02:16,961
It was a friendship thing that
developed out of the medical relationship.

754
01:02:17,561 --> 01:02:19,961
He was part of the family.

755
01:02:21,041 --> 01:02:23,961
He was very friendly towards me.

756
01:02:24,001 --> 01:02:27,521
And Alan would come
and sit by me and talk to me

757
01:02:27,561 --> 01:02:29,321
and take an interest in what I was doing.

758
01:02:30,841 --> 01:02:33,281
I just liked him as a person.

759
01:02:35,441 --> 01:02:40,321
As a child, I would sit there
on the floor playing the solitaire game.

760
01:02:40,361 --> 01:02:43,281
And he would sit there chatting.

761
01:02:43,321 --> 01:02:49,561
And then out of the blue
this letter arrived in the post.

762
01:02:50,081 --> 01:02:55,121
It says, 'Dear Maria. It is just to tell you
how to do the solitaire puzzle.'

763
01:02:56,001 --> 01:02:58,801
And there he's drawn a little diagram.

764
01:03:00,401 --> 01:03:02,761
And then he goes on to close the letter

765
01:03:02,801 --> 01:03:07,201
'I hope you all have a very nice
holiday in Italian Switzerland.

766
01:03:07,241 --> 01:03:09,721
I shall not be very far away

767
01:03:10,801 --> 01:03:15,321
at Club Mediterranée,
Ipsos, Corfu, Greece.

768
01:03:15,361 --> 01:03:17,481
Yours, Alan Turing.'

769
01:03:27,921 --> 01:03:31,761
During this period, Turing made
a couple of trips to the continent.

770
01:03:31,801 --> 01:03:36,801
British gay men often went abroad because
they were able to live more freely abroad.

771
01:03:37,521 --> 01:03:40,401
There was not this constant
looming threat of arrest.

772
01:03:46,841 --> 01:03:49,721
He sent us a card from Greece.

773
01:03:49,761 --> 01:03:55,041
'I've met the most lovely
young man on the beach', he says.

774
01:03:59,681 --> 01:04:05,321
The continent offered joys, pleasures,
especially after the war.

775
01:04:06,681 --> 01:04:10,001
And Greece had this mythological status.

776
01:04:10,041 --> 01:04:18,761
And by the 1950s, Paris, parts of Scandinavia,
offered these golden opportunities.

777
01:04:22,561 --> 01:04:27,521
During this period, he decided to make
a trip to Bergen, Norway for a holiday.

778
01:04:28,241 --> 01:04:30,441
He caught the ferry here in Newcastle

779
01:04:30,481 --> 01:04:34,721
and it was a ferry ride
right out there across the North Sea.

780
01:04:35,761 --> 01:04:38,121
Norway represented for him

781
01:04:38,161 --> 01:04:45,721
an alternative to the much more rigid,
repressive atmosphere of England at the time.

782
01:04:53,281 --> 01:04:55,641
I've been learning Norwegian.

783
01:04:57,761 --> 01:05:00,081
I rather like Norway.

784
01:05:00,841 --> 01:05:03,081
It may become a routine.

785
01:05:04,681 --> 01:05:07,601
They have dances there for men only.

786
01:05:07,641 --> 01:05:10,241
Men dancing with men. Imagine!

787
01:05:14,241 --> 01:05:18,281
While he was in Bergen,
he met a young Norwegian man named Kjell

788
01:05:18,321 --> 01:05:23,521
with whom, as he described it,
he shared a drunken kiss under a flag post.

789
01:05:24,561 --> 01:05:27,481
This episode, which seemed very innocent

790
01:05:27,521 --> 01:05:31,361
was unfortunately to have very,
very serious repercussions for him.

791
01:05:34,681 --> 01:05:38,881
There was a boy from Norway
who apparently came to visit me

792
01:05:39,601 --> 01:05:46,161
but something happened involving
the police and I never got to see him.

793
01:05:49,041 --> 01:05:51,001
His name was Kjell.

794
01:05:53,521 --> 01:05:56,161
He wrote to me to say
he was coming to visit.

795
01:05:56,201 --> 01:05:59,001
And, as I understand it, he arrived

796
01:06:00,561 --> 01:06:02,561
but before he could make contact

797
01:06:03,161 --> 01:06:07,561
it appears he was chased by the police
all over the north of bloody England

798
01:06:08,401 --> 01:06:10,481
and finally he went home.

799
01:06:13,401 --> 01:06:15,121
He was quiet.

800
01:06:15,161 --> 01:06:16,841
Handsome.

801
01:06:18,081 --> 01:06:20,241
A winning combination!

802
01:06:24,241 --> 01:06:27,001
I know they've been watching my house.

803
01:06:27,641 --> 01:06:30,201
Perhaps that's what spooked him.

804
01:06:33,161 --> 01:06:35,601
I wish they'd leave me alone.

805
01:06:41,041 --> 01:06:45,961
An important question is
why the police were following Turing.

806
01:06:46,001 --> 01:06:50,481
I suspect the reason was because
he was perceived as a major security risk.

807
01:06:51,321 --> 01:06:55,641
We have to remember that 1952 was
the absolute height of Cold War paranoia

808
01:06:55,681 --> 01:07:01,961
during which the idea of the homosexual traitor
was taking hold in the popular imagination.

809
01:07:04,041 --> 01:07:08,841
<i>Homosexuals must not
be handling top secret material.</i>

810
01:07:08,881 --> 01:07:11,761
<i>The pervert is easy prey
to the blackmailer.</i>

811
01:07:14,241 --> 01:07:16,321
Turing fit the part perfectly.

812
01:07:16,961 --> 01:07:21,481
We know that he had a lot
of classified, secret information

813
01:07:21,521 --> 01:07:24,401
that he had gathered during
his time at Bletchley Park.

814
01:07:24,961 --> 01:07:30,441
I think there was probably an assumption
that Turing might very well go rogue.

815
01:07:32,841 --> 01:07:36,281
And so the police really began
to close in on him.

816
01:07:36,321 --> 01:07:39,841
And this, I think,
is something very, very tragic.

817
01:07:39,881 --> 01:07:43,881
I think he began to feel increasingly
that he had no freedom anymore

818
01:07:43,921 --> 01:07:46,441
that he couldn't have
any kind of an ordinary life.

819
01:07:48,041 --> 01:07:51,961
It's worth bearing in mind that at the same time
he was undergoing the organo therapy

820
01:07:52,001 --> 01:07:55,321
which was playing havoc with his hormones.

821
01:08:02,081 --> 01:08:05,641
<i>It wasn't just Turing's body
that had been damaged.</i>

822
01:08:05,681 --> 01:08:08,401
<i>His brain too had been affected.</i>

823
01:08:10,521 --> 01:08:13,841
We know from the medical evidence
that if you castrate a man

824
01:08:13,881 --> 01:08:17,761
then you change his ability
to think and his ability to concentrate.

825
01:08:17,801 --> 01:08:22,641
And if you take testosterone away,
then the brain will become muddled.

826
01:08:28,081 --> 01:08:31,321
<i>[Turing's voice] I've got</i> a <i>shocking tendency
at present to fritter my time away</i>

827
01:08:31,361 --> 01:08:33,521
<i>in anything but what I ought to be doing.</i>

828
01:08:34,481 --> 01:08:39,281
<i>I thought I'd found the reason for all this,
but that hasn't made things much better.</i>

829
01:08:45,801 --> 01:08:50,281
In April 1953, his oestrogen treatment ends.

830
01:08:50,321 --> 01:08:54,081
Turing was perhaps expecting
things to change quickly

831
01:08:54,121 --> 01:08:58,561
but his body was not responding in the way
that he may have thought it would have done.

832
01:08:59,721 --> 01:09:05,601
The theory is if you stop exposure
of the male body to oestrogen

833
01:09:05,641 --> 01:09:10,961
then slowly over time his testosterone
levels will begin to rise.

834
01:09:11,001 --> 01:09:13,601
That's fine, in theory.

835
01:09:13,641 --> 01:09:20,481
It can take many, many months, six, seven, eight,
nine months, to recover sexual function, if at all.

836
01:09:20,521 --> 01:09:23,761
Some men report that they never
recover their sexual function

837
01:09:23,801 --> 01:09:27,201
after they've taken
oestrogen therapy for that long.

838
01:09:28,841 --> 01:09:33,441
Organo therapy was court-ordered at my trial
if I wanted to avoid prison.

839
01:09:33,481 --> 01:09:36,881
They're hormones, female hormones.

840
01:09:37,721 --> 01:09:41,761
They're meant to decrease my libido.
And they do... have.

841
01:09:42,481 --> 01:09:46,441
But being hormones,
they also cause other physical reactions.

842
01:09:49,001 --> 01:09:51,401
They say the effects are reversible.

843
01:09:54,281 --> 01:09:56,241
Well, it ends there.

844
01:09:57,561 --> 01:09:59,681
The thought ends there.

845
01:10:01,521 --> 01:10:04,881
I don't know why I should have
gone to such lengths to avoid prison.

846
01:10:04,921 --> 01:10:10,801
Being locked up with a bunch of ruffians?
I can imagine myself paying for that.

847
01:10:17,001 --> 01:10:18,121
Should we go inside?

848
01:10:23,521 --> 01:10:29,841
The condition of his life was becoming
increasingly untenable, increasingly grim.

849
01:10:30,641 --> 01:10:34,601
Somewhere along the line,
something broke.

850
01:10:35,561 --> 01:10:40,481
His ability to endure failed

851
01:10:40,521 --> 01:10:45,481
and the suffering that he was undergoing
became, I suspect, overwhelming.

852
01:10:51,921 --> 01:10:58,201
<i>In May 1954, Alan Turing joined Franz Greenbaum
and his family on a day trip to Blackpool</i>

853
01:10:58,241 --> 01:11:00,441
<i>a beach town in Northwest England.</i>

854
01:11:04,521 --> 01:11:11,241
Alan was wearing a stripy blazer
with the sleeves up here

855
01:11:11,281 --> 01:11:14,121
on the white shirt
poking out from underneath.

856
01:11:14,161 --> 01:11:17,201
So he really looked very strange.

857
01:11:18,041 --> 01:11:22,721
There was a fortune teller's tent
on the promenade

858
01:11:24,361 --> 01:11:29,001
and Alan decided that he would like
to go in and see the fortune teller.

859
01:11:29,041 --> 01:11:33,281
And he went in there
and he was gone for a little while

860
01:11:33,321 --> 01:11:37,041
and he came out and we looked at him

861
01:11:37,081 --> 01:11:40,041
and he was ashen-faced

862
01:11:40,801 --> 01:11:45,601
absolutely horrified expression on his face.

863
01:11:57,801 --> 01:11:59,641
Do you know what's here?

864
01:12:01,081 --> 01:12:02,201
What?

865
01:12:02,761 --> 01:12:05,921
Signals. Radio signals. Just here.

866
01:12:07,441 --> 01:12:11,001
The air is full of radio signals
flying past our heads

867
01:12:11,041 --> 01:12:12,321
ready to be intercepted.

868
01:12:14,801 --> 01:12:17,241
We all see different things.

869
01:12:18,081 --> 01:12:21,761
Do you know honeybees
see by ultraviolet light?

870
01:12:23,201 --> 01:12:28,401
Their eyes perceive a range of wavelengths
entirely different to what we can see as humans

871
01:12:28,441 --> 01:12:34,441
and so, even though we're in the same world,
we see another world entirely.

872
01:12:39,641 --> 01:12:42,441
When I went to see that
fortune teller in Blackpool

873
01:12:43,081 --> 01:12:46,801
she told me one or two things
I suppose I didn't want to know.

874
01:12:48,401 --> 01:12:50,121
What did she say?

875
01:12:50,161 --> 01:12:53,801
Our session was private,
just like yours and mine.

876
01:12:54,801 --> 01:12:57,841
But she saw things other people don't.

877
01:12:58,561 --> 01:13:00,321
Rather like you.

878
01:13:02,761 --> 01:13:08,041
He wouldn't divulge what had happened,
what the woman had said to him.

879
01:13:08,081 --> 01:13:11,681
He was desperately, desperately unhappy.

880
01:13:11,721 --> 01:13:14,801
And he didn't say anything more after that.

881
01:13:21,161 --> 01:13:23,801
I don't think I'm allowed to travel anymore.

882
01:13:26,121 --> 01:13:28,601
It doesn't matter what I say now, does it.

883
01:13:29,121 --> 01:13:31,801
They think our sort are weak-willed
and so we're bound to talk

884
01:13:31,841 --> 01:13:35,441
so fuck them, fuck them sideways.
I'll say whatever I please.

885
01:13:39,161 --> 01:13:42,721
Alan, what's happened?

886
01:13:43,401 --> 01:13:44,921
Nothing.

887
01:13:46,641 --> 01:13:48,321
Nothing's happened.

888
01:13:48,721 --> 01:13:51,641
Nothing new anyway, nothing different.

889
01:13:53,921 --> 01:13:58,721
There must have come a moment
when he felt it just wasn't worth it.

890
01:13:58,761 --> 01:14:01,361
That sense of despair.

891
01:14:02,241 --> 01:14:09,921
Whatever the possibilities of his life, for him,
those possibilities didn't seem realistic anymore.

892
01:14:12,281 --> 01:14:15,001
I've seen Snow White and
the Seven Dwarfs seven times.

893
01:14:15,041 --> 01:14:17,001
That's 49 times I've seen a dwarf.

894
01:14:18,521 --> 01:14:21,321
Do you ever wonder what poison
she soaks the apple in?

895
01:14:21,361 --> 01:14:23,041
They don't say in the film.

896
01:14:23,081 --> 01:14:24,881
She'd have had her pick.

897
01:14:24,921 --> 01:14:28,041
Poisons appear everywhere in nature.

898
01:14:28,481 --> 01:14:32,201
Some of the most beautiful flowers
contain the deadliest poisons.

899
01:14:32,241 --> 01:14:34,801
Oleander, Rhododendron, Narcissus.

900
01:14:38,281 --> 01:14:40,721
Do you know what their poison did to me?

901
01:14:42,121 --> 01:14:44,681
It shrunk my testicles.

902
01:14:46,481 --> 01:14:48,361
I grew breasts.

903
01:14:49,761 --> 01:14:54,561
I, we all, worked to break Hitler
because what did he do?

904
01:14:54,601 --> 01:14:56,161
Amongst other things?

905
01:14:57,241 --> 01:15:00,641
He sterilised Jews. Jews like you.

906
01:15:01,601 --> 01:15:04,321
We fought that bastard.
We defeated him.

907
01:15:04,361 --> 01:15:07,401
And when we were finished,
what did they do to me?

908
01:15:09,161 --> 01:15:11,721
And I'm supposed to allow it.

909
01:15:17,121 --> 01:15:19,641
It would be despicable
to do that to anyone

910
01:15:19,681 --> 01:15:23,801
but to do that to someone who ought to
have been treated as a national hero

911
01:15:23,841 --> 01:15:26,001
seems to me especially despicable.

912
01:15:26,761 --> 01:15:33,921
What he suffered was too profound
and too debilitating for him to recover from.

913
01:15:37,281 --> 01:15:41,041
He suddenly saw what a
nasty place the world was.

914
01:15:51,521 --> 01:15:53,001
There are things I can do.
We're all at war

915
01:15:53,041 --> 01:15:58,081
all of us, all of the time,
each in our own little fucking war.

916
01:15:59,481 --> 01:16:01,361
What are you saying?

917
01:16:04,041 --> 01:16:06,401
Don't worry. I'm not saying anything.

918
01:16:07,641 --> 01:16:12,801
Although Snow White,
coupled with my own perverse thinking

919
01:16:13,401 --> 01:16:17,641
did yield an amusing idea
as to how someone might kill himself

920
01:16:17,681 --> 01:16:20,881
using an apple and electrical wiring.

921
01:16:20,921 --> 01:16:23,081
That would be illegal.

922
01:16:23,121 --> 01:16:24,641
Well, if a man were successful

923
01:16:24,681 --> 01:16:27,881
the bastards would have to try
to pull him back from the mouth of hell

924
01:16:27,921 --> 01:16:30,641
and I have to say -
though I'm not telling you this

925
01:16:31,041 --> 01:16:34,081
it would almost be worth it
just to see them try.

926
01:16:37,841 --> 01:16:40,121
We all have decisions to make.

927
01:16:41,681 --> 01:16:44,801
I don't know what it was
that finally tipped him over the edge.

928
01:16:44,841 --> 01:16:51,841
But I think you've got a mixture there
that is just at boiling point

929
01:16:51,881 --> 01:16:55,801
and it won't take a lot more
to make it boil right over.

930
01:16:57,641 --> 01:17:00,001
Mathematicians talk about
the beauty of numbers

931
01:17:00,041 --> 01:17:01,881
but I know - because I was one -

932
01:17:01,921 --> 01:17:04,401
they're talking about the computable

933
01:17:05,481 --> 01:17:08,001
the beauty of what can be resolved.

934
01:17:09,241 --> 01:17:12,801
But what about the rest,
the greater infinity?

935
01:17:13,161 --> 01:17:20,281
What's not computable lies beyond
the infinitesimal sliver of knowledge

936
01:17:20,321 --> 01:17:26,241
we've managed to subdue inside
our fragile, trembling human consciousness

937
01:17:27,441 --> 01:17:34,161
a consciousness which is, in fact, decaying
within us from the moment we're born.

938
01:17:40,161 --> 01:17:42,761
I won't be able to come
for dinner on Sunday.

939
01:17:43,441 --> 01:17:45,961
I'm afraid I've made other plans.

940
01:17:46,001 --> 01:17:48,841
Alan, come back! Sit down!

941
01:18:04,201 --> 01:18:09,441
<i>Alan Turing's body was found by his
housekeeper on June the 8th, 1954.</i>

942
01:18:09,881 --> 01:18:12,161
<i>He was 41 years old.</i>

943
01:18:12,561 --> 01:18:16,681
<i>The death was recorded as suicide,
caused by cyanide poisoning.</i>

944
01:18:17,641 --> 01:18:20,721
<i>A half-eaten apple lay by his bedside.</i>

945
01:18:21,561 --> 01:18:23,481
<i>He left no note.</i>

946
01:18:25,481 --> 01:18:30,401
My mum came in and she said,
'I've got something to tell you'.

947
01:18:30,441 --> 01:18:32,841
And she said, 'Alan has died'.

948
01:18:32,881 --> 01:18:35,361
And I was just so upset.

949
01:18:39,081 --> 01:18:44,081
When we heard that he'd died,
our father was very upset.

950
01:18:44,121 --> 01:18:50,401
It was very disturbing.
Terrible waste of a brilliant brain.

951
01:18:52,521 --> 01:18:57,321
We lost one of our great computer scientists,
one of our great mathematicians

952
01:18:57,361 --> 01:19:00,441
one of our first mathematical biologists

953
01:19:00,921 --> 01:19:07,961
and I think British science
would have advanced faster

954
01:19:08,001 --> 01:19:10,081
and would have been different
in many ways

955
01:19:10,121 --> 01:19:14,401
more creative, in some ways,
if Turing had lived.

956
01:19:17,321 --> 01:19:21,001
I think all we can say is that
it is a terrible tragedy

957
01:19:21,041 --> 01:19:26,241
that such a great and brilliant man
should have had to suffer so much.

958
01:19:26,281 --> 01:19:31,201
And that his life should have
ended in such a tragic way.