It is not our intention in this book to give a detailed life history and background to Alan Turing in all its complexity with the many issues that it raised. This is done very well elsewhere, for example in Andrew Hodges’ excellent biography of Turing (Hodges, 1992). What this book is about is Turing's imitation game, pure and simple.

However the game, which came into existence in the late 1940s and was fine tuned in the early 1950s, continues to spark a plethora of misunderstandings, arguments and much controversy particularly with regard to its philosophical context. As a result we feel that it is well worthwhile taking a look at some aspects of Turing's life so that we can get to grips with the game a little better.

In order for us to comprehend the particular phenomenon that is the imitation game, what we try to do in this chapter is to understand more about the actual person and what he was like. We do this by drawing on some of his lectures, on some of the biographies about him and through the comments of people that knew him. Hopefully with this background we will be able to get to grips with what the imitation game is really all about.

Bletchley Park

During the Second World War, Turing worked in Bletchley Park, the UK's main decryption centre, which subsequently became famous as the place the code for the German Enigma machine was cracked. Some of the UK's leading mathematicians were brought together in one place and Turing was one of them.

Turing had realized early on that a large part of deciphering amounted to performing a whole series of manipulations and calculations in an automated fashion and that this could be achieved much better by a machine than by a human, partly because the machine could keep working on the problem without sleep and partly because it didn't make mistakes. Along with Gordon Welchman (see Davies, 1999), who like Turing had previously been at Cambridge University, he redesigned a Polish electromechanical cipher-breaking machine and, in 1940, they called their device the Bombe. In fact it consisted largely of rows and rows of uniselectors which were the standard telecommunications technology at the time for telephone routing.