8/2/2019 Nature482_00_Turing at 100 - Legacy of a Universal Mind

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From the day he was born —23 June 1912 — Alan MathisonTuring seemed destined to solitude, misun-

derstanding and persecution (see page 441). Ashis centenary year opens,Naturehails him as oneof the top scientific minds of all time (see page440). This special issue sweeps through Turing’sinnumerable achievements, taking us from hismost famous roles — wartime code-breaker andfounder of computer science (see page 459) — tohis lesser known interests of botany, neural nets,

unorganized machines, quantum physics and,well, ghosts (see page 562).

Everyone sees a different Turing. A molecu-lar biologist might surprise you by saying thatTuring’s most important paper is his 1936 workon the ‘Turing machine’ because of its rel-evance to DNA-based cellular operations (seepage 461). A biophysicist could instead pointto his 1952 work on the formation of biologicalpatterns — the first simulation of nonlinear

dynamics ever to be pub-lished (see page 464).

Beneath it all, Turingwas driven by the dream of 

reviving — possibly in the

form of a computer program —the soul of Christopher Morcom,

perhaps his only true friend, who died abruptly when they were both teenagers. I want to “builda brain”, he said. So does electrophysiologistHenry Markram (see page 456). But it is still amatter of debate whether machine intelligenceshould faithfully simulate neuronal circuitry,or just emulate brain function using whateverexpedient (see page 462).

Even when Turing was kept busy by wartime

code-breaking and the practical implementa-tion of his universal computer, he never forgotthat he had, in 1936, discovered something evenbigger: the ‘incomputable’ world. Contempo-rary physics hasn’t even started to work out theimplications of that discovery (see page 465).

It is typical of Turing’s brilliance and play-fulness that even as he gave so many fields thetools that allowed them to blossom, he planteda concept that pushes science as we know it— physical reality and Newtonian causality—towards the abyss. ■

Tanguy Chouard , a biology editor at Nature ,

was the consulting editor for this special issue.

LEGACY OF A UNIVERSAL MIND

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