Alan Turing is a British computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and theoretical biologist.

Turing was also a world-class distance runner. His marathon best time was 246 minutes and 03 seconds (manually timed), 11 minutes slower than the 1948 Standing Games gold medal time. In a cross-country race in 1948, he outran Olympic silver medalist Tom Richards that same year.

During World War II, Turing was a key player in breaking German codes at Bletchley Park. Historian and wartime codebreaker Asa Briggs once said: “You need extraordinary talent. You need Bletchley's genius, and Turing was that genius.”

From September 1938, Turing worked part-time at the Government Cryptozoology and Cryptozoology School (GC&CS), a British cryptography organization. Together with senior GC&CS cryptanalyst , he focused on cryptanalysis of the Enigma cipher machine used by Nazi Germany.

In 1939, Turing was recruited by the British Royal Navy and worked on deciphering Nazi Germany's secret military codes under the supervision of MI6. Two years later, his team successfully deciphered the German encryption system Enigma, giving MI6 a clear understanding of Germany's military commands and plans.

Alan Turing developed a device to decipher enemy secrets, allowing more than 14 million people to avoid war, and the prototype of the computer was born at that moment.

From 1945 to 1948, Turing was responsible for the research of the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) at the National Physical Laboratory. In 1949, he became deputy director of the Computer Laboratory of the University of Manchester and was responsible for the earliest real computer, Manchester One. software work. In Turing's research on artificial intelligence, the most representative one is the Turing test proposed in 1950. It is a famous test to determine whether a machine can think and display intelligence similar to humans.

In 1952, Turing wrote a chess program (Turochamp). However, at that time, no computer had enough computing power to execute this program, so he imitated the computer and took half an hour for each step. He played a game with a colleague, and the program lost.

Later, a research team at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA, designed the world's first computer program for chess - Los Alamos chess - on ENIAC based on Turing's theory.

Turing's career was ruined by persecution for his homosexuality.

In 1952, his friend and an accomplice broke into Turing's house and burglarized it. A British police investigation resulted in him being charged. He pleaded no contest and was convicted. After a public trial, he was given two options: jail or chemical castration. He opted for estrogen injections, which continued for a year. During this period, the side effects of the drugs caused great physical and mental harm to him who originally loved sports.

Turing died in 1954 after eating an apple soaked in cyanide solution. Many believed he committed suicide, but his mother argued that his death was the result of accidentally contaminating an apple with a cyanide solution.

Alan Turing, who helped the British decipher German military communication codes during World War II, was convicted of “gross indecency” by the British government that had anti-gay laws at the time because of his homosexual orientation. He died at the age of 41 after biting into a “poison apple” laced with cyanide.

On the centenary of Turing’s birth in 2012, tens of thousands of Britons petitioned the British government to grant Turing a posthumous pardon but failed; it was not until December 24, 2013 that the Queen of England issued a royal pardon exonerating Turing.

Alan Turing also made us understand that we should not ignore the success of others because of some of our own prejudices. We should be a respectful, friendly and tolerant world citizen.