Alan Turing: The Enigma (80 page)

It was a picture drawn from nineteenth
century physics, chemistry and biology. But the Turing challenge was on a different level of deterministic description, that of the abstract logical machine, as he had defined it. There was another difference. Victorians like Butler, Shaw and Carpenter had concerned themselves with identifying a soul, a spirit or life force. Alan Turing was talking about ‘intelligence’.

Alan did not define what he meant by this word, but the chess-playing paradigm, to which he constantly returned, would make it the faculty of working out how to achieve some goal, and the reference to IQ tests would indicate some measurable kind of performance of this skill. Coming from Bletchley, this kind of ‘intelligence’ was of burning and obvious significance. Intelligence had won the war. They had solved countless chess problems, and had beaten the Germans at the game. And more broadly, for his scientific generation, life had been a battle for ‘intelligence’, fought against stupid out-of-date schools, a stupid economic system, and stupid Blimps from ‘a profession for fools’ during the war – not to mention the Nazis, who had elevated stupidity into a religion. There was the influence of a Webbsian vision of socialism, in which society was going to be administered by intelligent functionaries of the state, as in the near future of
Back to Methuselah
, and in 1947 there was much talk about IQ tests, since the British youth was supposedly being newly divided into scientifically defined categories according to ‘intelligence’ rather than by class. Oscar Wilde had written of
The Soul of Man under Socialism
, but under the socialism of Attlee and Bevin words like ‘soul’ – supernatural or ‘soupy’ words as Bertrand Russell called them – could be left to bishops and pep talks about team spirit.

While many people might have reservations about the wisdom and beneficence of scientists, they were at last basking in the favour of government. The war had converted government to an interest in science, and a view once visionary, then progressive, was becoming orthodox. The scientists had emerged from the miserly corners in which they had done their despised ‘stinks’ before, and it seemed that their swords could be turned into ploughshares, or more precisely, that they would supply governments with scientific solutions to their problems. On one level Alan Turing belonged to this climate of opinion, and certainly rejected the idea that scientists, rather than generals and politicians, were to blame for the world’s current imperfections. Mermagen from Sherborne days, now a master at Radley, another public school, wrote to Alan at this time for advice about the place of mathematics and science in the post-war world, and Alan replied:
⁴¹

On the subject of careers for mathematicians I am strongly inclined to think that the effect of ACE, guided projectiles, etc, etc, will be towards a considerably greater demand for mathematicians from a certain level upwards. For instance I
am in need of a number who will be required to convert problems into a form which can be understood by the machine. The critical level may be described roughly as the degree of intelligence shown by the machine. We obviously do not want people who can take no responsibility at all. We just make the machine do the work which might have been given to them.· At present of course this critical level is very low and I am sure you need not be afraid of encouraging boys that are keen and want to take up a mathematical career. The worst danger is probably an anti-scientific reaction (Scientists instead of goats at Bikini etc) but this is a digression.
^*

But what was the intelligence for? – that was the unasked question. What was the goal towards which the technicians and managers were now working? There was a vacuum at the centre in 1947, as the convictions of the 1930s and the enforced unity of the war, evaporated away. The great opponent in the chess game had been beaten, and no one had yet taken his place.

By speaking of the mind in terms of puzzle-solving intelligence, of finding efficient means for undiscussed ends, Alan Turing superficially epitomised the technocratic outlook of 1947 social management. But it was only on the surface. For he had no interest in applying computers or related ‘Wellsian developments’ to the problems of society. He had wisely put examples of the usefulness of the computer into his report, to get it paid for. But his picture of the imagined installation simply copied what he had seen in operation at Bletchley. He knew it could be done, but had little interest in it nor indeed the ability to organise this side of it himself. The ACE would need a Travis to keep it going. Even in this letter, superficially about the usefulness of mathematics, his interest lay in comparing the intelligence of the planned computer with that of boys – a favourite comparison, in fact. His whole enterprise was still motivated by a fascination with knowledge itself, in this case with an understanding of the magic of the human mind. He was not a Babbage, with an interest in the more efficient division of labour. His interest in the ACE had little to do with the ‘mechanization, rationalization, modernization’ that Orwell foresaw, although the computer might be funded for this purpose. It was much closer to an undiminished wonder at ‘the glory and beauty of Nature’, and an almost erotic longing to encompass it. Indeed his letter to W.R. Ashby had stated baldly that

In working on the ACE I am more interested in the possibility of producing models of the action of the brain than in the practical applications to computing.

If, furthermore, he had left something out by confining his account of mind to a discussion of puzzle-solving, an omission that reflected the temper of the times, this was not because he thought that this kind of ‘intelligence’
was one of vast superiority to other human characteristics. In fact it was almost the reverse.

Perhaps this was the most surprising thing about Alan Turing. Despite all he had done in the war, and all the struggles with stupidity, he still did not think of intellectuals or scientists as forming a superior class. The intelligent machine, taking over the role of the ‘masters’, would be a development which would cut the intellectual expert down to size. As Victorian technology had mechanised the work of the artisans, the computer of the future would automate the trade of intelligent thinking. The craft jealousy displayed by human experts only delighted him. In this way he was an anti-technocrat, subversively diminishing the authority of the new priests and magicians of the world. He wanted to make intellectuals into ordinary people. This was not at all calculated to please Sir Charles Darwin.

Alan’s talk was, as it happened, given on the same day that the British government announced its rapid withdrawal from India. The lessons of the war were at last sinking in, accentuated by the fuel crisis which the new management of the National Coal Board were powerless to control. Britain was no longer one of the ‘Big Three’, her role in the Mediterranean being quickly taken by the United States. It was a moment of truth, in which Britain appeared as a giant desert island. Germany had forced the truly Big Two out of an artificial isolation, and neither of them had fought to preserve British interests or markets. If there was a silver lining in the clouds, it was the fond belief that Britain could do better than ‘the American tradition of solving one’s difficulties by means of much equipment rather than by thought,’ in Alan’s words.

The British government was well-disposed to finding scientific solutions to its problems, and had announced on 5 February a grand plan to plant its East African colonies with groundnuts. The ACE, likewise, though it represented only a fraction of the investment in the groundout scheme, was still in 1947 a highly progressive project. It was just what the left-wing pressure groups had called for in the 1930s, with the state taking over the development of new science and technology instead of leaving it to the caprice of commerce. Blackett, as president of the Association of Scientific Workers, was at the vanguard of this movement. In 1947 he wrote an introduction to the ASW book
Science and the Nation
, which promised such modern wonders as ‘the scientific organisation of bureaucracy’. Yet the application in peacetime of such scientific policies was liable to go in unforeseen directions. Blackett himself, by enticing F.C. Williams to work on a pure-mathematical computer at Manchester, had not exactly helped the national plan. And although a left-wing advocate of planning, he had shown considerable personal dash and enterprise. Darwin’s position was more paradoxical still. Whether for hereditary or other reasons, he held the right-
wing views of a Social Darwinist, taking a dim view of the welfare state.
⁴²
(’The policy of paying most attention to the inferior types is the most inefficient way possible of achieving the perfectibility of the human race.’) His recipe for progress, or rather for a check to what he considered to be European racial suicide, was that men who had been ‘promoted’ should endeavour to have more children than others. Yet the dispensations of the NPL resembled less the jungle of cut-and-thrust competition than the ham-fisted management of the Soviet Union. They did not create an environment in which variety and initiative could long survive.

In the spring of 1947, while Darwin applied the higher realms of his thought to solving the problem of Alan Turing, incoherent initiatives were taken by more impatient people on the lower rungs of the promotion scale. One of these was Harry Huskey, who was very eager to see a start made on building a computer before his year was out. He admired the general form of the ACE design, but believed that the best plan would be to construct a small delay line machine ‘on a plan which is a compromise between the NPL and the Moore School plans.’ Relations between Alan and Huskey had been cool from the start, but they deteriorated when one day in the spring, Alan went into Mike Woodger’s room to find him engaged upon writing a program headed ‘Version H’. This was in fact an adaptation by Huskey of the Version V of the ACE, trimmed to include only the barest minimum of apparatus required to do a useful job, which was defined as the solution of eight simultaneous equations.
^*
Though generally consistent with the ACE design philosophy, such a departure necessarily subverted Alan’s control of the project. He had tolerated the ‘pilot’ policy on the understanding that the pilot would not detract from the full machine, but would become an integral part of it. If Huskey’s project failed, it would be a waste of time, and if it succeeded, it would lead to a marked change of plan. Naturally, Alan boycotted the development. Somehow Harry Huskey managed to scrape together enough equipment to make a start. His official role was ‘on the apparatus side’, and he was better at the form-filling; furthermore he did not need to think in terms of building the grand ACE installation, but only in terms of an experimental set-up. Jim Wilkinson and Mike Woodger joined in. Life in the Mathematics Division became very complicated, but they did learn something about electronics for the first time.

At the same time, Alan managed to make a few experiments of his own in the cellar of Teddington Hall, the Mathematics Division building, and explained some electronics to Mike Woodger. He had devised circuits to
transmit and receive pulses along a delay line, and a system to probe the circuit so as to examine the shape of the pulse on an oscilloscope. The NPL had nothing in the way of a machine to do this elementary engineering task, so, as at Hanslope, he had made one for himself. The whole thing
⁴³
involved mounting four or five valves on a breadboard, and no more. He had no delay line to work with. A little later, coming back from lunch, he spotted a drainpipe lying in the long grass, and had someone help carry it back for him to try out as an air delay line. Don Bayley and ‘Jumbo’ Lee came and saw this ‘dog’s breakfast’ of an outfit in March or April 1947. Alan took Don for a walk round the grounds and complained bitterly of how he had been thwarted. Alister Watson, philosopher now turned radar expert, visited the NPL on business and heard Alan complain that ‘they say I don’t understand magnetism!’ Francis Price from Princeton days, whose family lived at Teddington, heard out his acrid comments on how the administration denied him the most standard pieces of equipment for experiment.
^*

But these anarchic developments were overtaken by Darwin’s decision. He had become reconciled to the fact it would not be possible now, as it might have been during the war, to farm out the ACE to other organisations. Hitherto he had resisted setting up an electronics section within the NPL. But now it had become clear that there would be no single national computer, as had been expected in 1946, but various installations of which the NPL, if it was lucky, would have just one. His new plan was for a prototype to be constructed at the NPL, whereupon it would go to English Electric.

This was a sound policy. The tenuous link with Wilkes was formally snapped on 10 April, and the Post Office contract cancelled. Instead, during the summer of 1947, a new Electronics section of the Radio Division was set up, under a certain H.A. Thomas.

But these were two drawbacks to the new policy. The first was that Thomas’s interest lay in the industrial application of electronics, and not in computers. The second was that he had little knowledge of the use of electronics for pulse or digital techniques. It was not that he refused to make any concession at all to the ACE project, for indeed he very quickly produced a report (with which Womersley was ‘in full agreement’) on how a computer should be built. But this made little reference to the Turing scheme. Then Thomas imported some enormous cathode ray tubes from Germany. He intended them for use as digital display tubes. The staff from the ACE section dutifully went and stared at these, but with some amazement, for they seemed completely irrelevant to the plans for the computer.