Chapter 950: Alan Mathison Turing
While the conference in London was discussing how to carve up Europe's interests, Arthur was also plotting in Australasia how to lay out the development of a major technology of the future—the technology of computing.
Speaking of computer technology, one could not avoid mentioning Britain's famous mathematician and logician, Alan Mathison Turing, known as the Father of Computer Science, the Father of Artificial Intelligence, and the Founder of Computer Logic.
The development of computer science actually had a little-known hidden history.
Although the first widely recognized computer had been manufactured by the U.S. military, the electronic computer Colossus, developed by Britain to decipher coded messages, had appeared two years earlier than America's so-called first computer.
Yet the British people had always kept silent about the honor of developing their first computer. They had not only made no declaration that the honor of creating the first computer should belong to Britain, but even Turing, who had developed it, rarely mentioned it.
What was the reason?
When all the causes were traced back to their source, the reason was actually Turing himself.
In terms of his contributions to the computer industry, Turing had absolutely been a bona fide pioneer of computer technology, as well as the universally recognized Father of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence.
But because his orientation was not accepted at the time, Turing had suffered tremendous pressure. He had even been forced to undergo psychiatric treatment and eventually taken his own life.
Although in the later twenty-first century, Britain's Queen Elizabeth II had announced a pardon for Turing, nearly sixty years had already passed since Turing's death. The so-called pardon had merely been Britain's compromise for the sake of public opinion.
Considering Turing's importance to the development of computer science, Arthur felt it necessary