Wednesday 16 November 2011

Alan Turing





Looking forward to attending the reception at Saville Exchange Building to celebrate Tommy Brown, WW2 hero who rescued the Enigma codes from a sinking ship. Tommy had joined the navy as an under-age kitchen hand. When the ship was going down he retrieved the books, climbed up the ladder holding them under his arm. Turing would have been proud. I had the good fortune to meet Tommy`s sister at the last event held at North Shields where I read some of my poems recorded in Monkfish Productions poetry booth.

Turing was persecuted for being gay. He was offered a choice to accept beinging injected with female hormones or jail. He chose the former which drove him to commit suicide. He was in his early forties. We think computing has advanced, what if he`d lived? Because of evolution in computing, this reinforces my belief that we have no need of a creator, just a designer, self organisation....the way to go.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

None of the stuff Turin or Flowers did was allowed to be published. Flowers paid his own money to build the Colossus computer but wasn't allowed to use it again after the war. He died in relative obscurity. Bloody governments. He originally designed it for the post office but nobody believed it would work. Politicians are mindless talentless miscreants. Atavistic humans.

Yvonne Young said...

Indeed "Bloody governments" And also jealous scientists who don`t want to accept change from what has previously been decreed.

My brother created an animation called Love Version 2.0, check it out on my list of favourites, it`s dedicated to Tommy Flowers.

How many more brilliant minds have been forgotten about?