Placeholder Image

字幕列表 影片播放

  • In World War II the Germans had the ultimate message coding

  • device the Enigma machine.

  • And if the Allies were going to win

  • they were going to need to figure it out.

  • Fortunately, the Allies had an ultimate weapon

  • of their own Alan Turing.

  • Turing basically invented the modern computer,

  • and though he never set foot on a battlefield

  • he was instrumental in helping end World War II.

  • You think Turing would have been treated like a hero for his

  • achievement but he wasn't.

  • Today we're going to take a look at the heroic life

  • and tragic death of Alan Turing.

  • But before we get started, be sure to subscribe

  • to the Weird History channel.

  • And let us know in the comments below what

  • other famous unsung heroes you would like to hear about.

  • OK, let's crack the Enigma that was Alan Turing.

  • In the 1950s being homosexual in the United Kingdom

  • was worse than taboo.

  • It was illegal.

  • Despite knowing this Turing was fairly open

  • about his sexual orientation.

  • When he was 39 he started a relationship

  • with a 19-year-old drifter named Arnold Murray.

  • Murray then burgled Turing's house

  • who then reported it to the police.

  • His relationship emerged during the investigation

  • and Turing was arrested for gross indecency.

  • This indecency law had been on the books

  • for well over a century, and it was the same statute

  • that Oscar Wilde had been tried under in the 1980s.

  • Turing was convicted and given an option he could go to prison

  • or be put on a treatment of female hormones.

  • He chose the latter.

  • Turing had been instrumental in helping win World War II,

  • but when it came to his indecency conviction

  • no one cared.

  • In the eyes of his society at the time being gay outweighed

  • any of the good he had done.

  • While he avoided jail time he was put on probation

  • and had to start taking estrogen pills.

  • This was in effect chemical castration.

  • There were a lot of downsides to the hormone treatment.

  • Its goal was to make gay people straight,

  • but in reality it just made Turing grow breasts and become

  • impotent.

  • It could also act as a depressant.

  • Well, the imitation game shows Turing

  • as broken by his punishment, in reality he kept

  • working on various projects.

  • In a more general sense the severity of Turing's punishment

  • provides a window into 1950s Britain's mindset.

  • In 1952 the same year Turing was arrested,

  • a progressive tabloid at the time

  • published an article calling gay men among other things freaks,

  • and framing gay people as a problem

  • that something needed to be done about.

  • Turing put on a brave face but inside he was suffering.

  • Unable to be himself his thoughts

  • turned to ending his life.

  • Turing was found on June 8, 1954 by his housekeeper.

  • He had eaten half of an apple that was laced with cyanide.

  • The coroner ruled it a suicide.

  • And note, while there is an urban legend

  • that this event inspired the Apple

  • logo with a bite taken out, but that legend it's not true.

  • That being said, there may actually be more to the story.

  • Friends of Turing along with his mother

  • thought he might have accidentally taken

  • his own life.

  • They claimed he hadn't seemed depressed

  • in the days and weeks leading up to his death.

  • There was also the fact that he had

  • been experimenting with cyanide in a personal lobotomy

  • before he died.

  • They theorized that rather than having used the poison

  • to deliberately taint the apple ,

  • he may have accidentally gotten some on it.

  • But that's not the end of the story either.

  • There is yet another even more interesting theory.

  • Some think that the British government was still

  • concerned that he would be forced to leak secrets because

  • of his then well-known sexual orientation,

  • and that they poisoned him on purpose.

  • Sadly we may never know the truth

  • since he didn't leave a note.

  • After World War II was over, the Cold War started immediately.

  • Code breaking was still an important skill

  • and Turing was able to continue his work.

  • He was even paid the then huge sum of 5,000 pounds

  • a year to work for the government communications

  • headquarters or GCHQ.

  • His triumph was short lived however.

  • The US and UK were working closely when it came

  • to government intelligence.

  • And America also had a harsh view of homosexuality.

  • The US thought there was a chance that any homosexual man

  • could be honey trapped and extorted to share information

  • to prevent being outed.

  • When Turing was arrested he lost his security clearance,

  • effectively ending his ability to work as a code breaker.

  • It made him furious.

  • Turing knew he was gay from a young age.

  • We know this because he developed feelings for a friend

  • when he was in school.

  • The boy's name was Christopher and while they

  • were good friends, Turing's romantic feelings

  • were not reciprocated.

  • Turing later wrote that while his friend knew how he

  • felt he hated him showing it.

  • Nevertheless both were geeks and they bonded over stuff

  • like math and chemistry.

  • Christopher died very young and Turing was devastated.

  • When he started working at code breaking central at Bletchley

  • Park during World War II, Turing was pretty open

  • about his preferences.

  • Nonetheless at one point he actually

  • proposed to his good friend Joan Clarke.

  • They did a lot of fun things together like go on dates

  • and see movies, but she was still shocked

  • when he asked her to marry him.

  • She said yes but the next day they went for a walk,

  • and he admitted to her that he had homosexual tendencies.

  • She was concerned but didn't end the engagement,

  • that would happen later.

  • And it was Turing who broke it off.

  • If Turing was such a war hero why was he

  • treated so badly afterwards.

  • Part of it came down to the fact that he couldn't actually

  • tell anyone what he had achieved during the conflict.

  • Everyone who worked at Bletchley Park was sworn to secrecy.

  • They couldn't even discuss what they were doing

  • with their immediate families.

  • Some of them died still keeping the secret.

  • The truth about how much they had achieved

  • was only still emerging well into the 21st century.

  • This meant that when Turing was arrested

  • he couldn't tell the cops that he was the savior of England.

  • The guy who Winston Churchill had said

  • made the single biggest contribution to ending the war.

  • Instead, they just treated him like a perv.

  • It's hard not to believe his punishment would

  • have been less dire if he could have told

  • people what he had achieved.

  • Turing was still a graduate student

  • when he first changed history.

  • He was studying at Princeton and wrote

  • a paper called "On Computable Numbers, With An Application

  • To The Entscheidungs Problem."

  • Well, that might not sound like the most mind blowingly

  • interesting reading material ever, it arguably was.

  • It basically invented computer science as we know it.

  • The paper imagined a machine that

  • could solve as many problems as the human brain.

  • And the best part was it would be instructed

  • to do different things by putting those instructions

  • on paper tape.

  • Yeah, well he was still just a student

  • Turing invented software.

  • He's theoretical machine could be told to do anything,

  • whereas before a computer would be built just

  • to solve one kind of problem.

  • Turing's universal machine was a computer as we know it today.

  • Before World war II code breaking

  • was a strictly human affair.

  • The human brain was the most powerful computer in the world.

  • And it was thought that if people could make up

  • fiendish codes, other people should

  • be able to figure them out.

  • But then the Germans created the Enigma machine.

  • The Polish had managed to crack it's initial code

  • before the war even started, but then the Germans just

  • made it even more complicated.

  • Even with 12,000 people working three shifts around the clock

  • at the British Secret Code Deciphering Facility

  • at Bletchley Park, no one could break it.

  • That's where Turing and computers stepped in.

  • Turing was instrumental in creating a code breaking

  • machine called the Bombe.

  • By the end of the war the Bombe figured out everything

  • that the German Navy was saying.

  • This was huge.

  • Then General Dwight Eisenhower even said

  • that the work done by Turing and his colleagues at Bletchley

  • probably shorten the war by two years.

  • Turing and his computer had saved millions of lives.

  • In 1950 Turing came up with an important question,

  • can machines think?

  • This led to one of the greatest problems ever devised.

  • He wanted to see if computers would one day be

  • so smart they could actually trick people

  • into believing they were human.

  • It worked like this, someone would sit and ask questions

  • to two participants.

  • One would be a computer and one was a human,

  • but the questioner wouldn't know which was which.

  • After five minutes they would try

  • to determine which one was the human,

  • then another person would have a turn

  • at questioning and guessing.

  • If more than 30% of the time the questioners

  • guessed the computer was the human,

  • the machine would have passed the Turing test.

  • For a long time, it seemed like this would be impossible.

  • Then in 2014 a computer called Eugene

  • that was built to simulate a 13-year-old boy managed to fool

  • 33% of the participants.

  • The Turing test had finally been passed

  • and Turing had helped prove machines

  • could be as smart as humans.

  • Turing was treated appallingly in his lifetime,

  • but at the very minimum some of it

  • was righted after he died, even if it took people a long time.

  • In 2009 there was an online petition

  • calling for an apology for how the British government had

  • treated Turing.

  • Then Prime Minister Gordon brown did offer one,

  • but many felt that it wasn't enough.

  • Almost 60 years after Turing took his own life

  • a royal pardon for his crime was granted by the queen.

  • That wasn't the end of the good that finally

  • came from Turing's tragic fate.

  • In 2017 the Turing law came into effect.

  • This automatically pardoned any men

  • who had been convicted of homosexual acts

  • but had died before the laws were changed.

  • Any man who was still alive could seek out and receive

  • a pardon for the same.

  • Once again it was Alan Turing to the rescue.

  • So what do you think?

  • How was Turing treated in his lifetime?

  • Let us know in the comments below.

  • And while you're at it, check out some of these other videos

  • from our Weird History.

In World War II the Germans had the ultimate message coding

字幕與單字

單字即點即查 點擊單字可以查詢單字解釋

B1 中級 美國腔

图灵的生与死(The Life and Death of Alan Turing)

  • 81 1
    joey joey 發佈於 2021 年 05 月 20 日
影片單字