Alan Turing

(1912 - 1954)

In 1941 British scientist and mathematician Alan Turing circulated an early paper about machine intelligence to code-breaker colleagues at Bletchley Park. After the war, he produced what is considered the first AI manifesto. In what is now known as the Turing test, a machine must fool at least 30 percent of judges into believing it is human. He was prosecuted for “gross indecency” in 1952, and later was forced to take hormonal treatment to decrease his libido. He died of cyanide poisoning in 1954. In 2014, at the University of Reading, a computer program simulating a thirteen-year-old Ukrainian boy named Eugene Goostman became the first to ever beat the Turing Test.