A Turing-less World

“A Great science fiction detective story” – Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

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Days since the Centenary: 136

Days to the Bicentennial: 36,388

In theory the Alan Turing Year is winding down–it has less than two months to go–but in fact it doesn’t seem to be slowing much.

Here’s one of the latest testaments to Turing’s place in history: a detailed speculation on whether the Second World War might have turned out very differently if he hadn’t existed.

Now, counterfactual speculation is always tricky, so whatever conclusion one reaches in an exercise like this will always be open to attack. Whatever your conclusion, someone can find traction to make an argument against it. There are simply too many variables.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about going through this exercise with Turing, then, is simply that you have to ask the question very seriously. Because it’s entirely realistic to say that without him the war might have ended very differently indeed, and there are not many people about whom you can say that.

In this case the person doing the speculating is Jack Copeland, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and Director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing.

Professor Jack Copeland

We’ve seen Professor Copeland on this page before, most notably in Alan Turing & The Suicide Question. Copeland is conducting this historical exercise on the web page Big Questions Online.

Big Questions Online interrogates the possibility of history without Alan Turing.

For a Turing scholar, Copeland is admirably restrained in his assessment of the possible effect of not having had Turing’s contribution to the Allied war effort.

That restraint on Copeland’s part, that conservatism, gives his estimate of the difference between the world with Turing and the world without him even greater impact than a more free-wheeling scenario might have had.

History records that the allied armies took roughly a year to fight their way from the beaches to Berlin. In a counterfactual scenario, in which Hitler had had more time to consolidate his preparations, this struggle might have taken much longer—twice as long maybe. That translates into a very large number of lives. At a conservative estimate, each year of fighting in Europe brought on average about seven million deaths… these colossal numbers of lives—7 million had the war continued for another year, 21 million if, owing to the Atlantic U-boats and a strengthened Fortress Europe, the war had toiled on for as long as another three years—do most certainly convey a sense of the magnitude of Turing’s contribution.

The number of lives at stake is so large that even if you cut them arbitrarily in half, or quarter them, they’re still vast.

The number of people who would have suffered and died rather than having lived out their lives is immense. The number of their descendents who would not have been born, millions of them alive today, is even greater. Maybe it even includes you.

Even putting aside Turing’s other achievements–his continuing legacy in computer science and artificial intelligence, not to mention his later work in biology–that’s one hell of a legacy.

Churchill: Turing made the single biggest contribution to the war effort

Days to Centenary: 248

It’s sometimes easy all these years after the end of World War II to lose track of the significance of events and individuals, even when at the time the events were staggering and the individuals were critical to the course of history. It’s even easier to lose track of an individual’s impact when it was a closely guarded government secret during the war and for a long time afterward.

Alan Turing’s work at the centre of the extremely successful Bletchley Park codebreaking efforts is now a well documented matter of historical record, but even so it’s easy to underestimate it because the secrecy which earlier surrounded it prevented it from gathering to itself the attributes of a legend in the way that contributions that were publicized as they took place (or shortly afterward) were able to do. It never gained the momentum to reach critical mass, to mix physics metaphors for a moment.

And, in today’s computer-dependent world, it may be that Turing’s other contributions — as the intellectual father of the universal computer and the instigator of artificial intelligence — are so glaringly relevant to our day to day lives that it’s easy to allow those aspects of his life to overshadow his war work.

Finally, Turing did so much, and the praise that’s resulted has (much after the fact) become so effusive, that it’s tempting to assume that it’s overblown. One might even be forgiven for thinking that in a rush to distance itself from its shameful gay-bashing past, modern Britain has overshot the mark and exaggerated Turing’s importance to the Allied war effort.

So just how important was he? Winston Churchill said that Turing made the single biggest contribution to Allied victory in the war against Nazi Germany and its Axis partners. Not one of the biggest, or really bloody huge, or damned near incalculable, but the single most estimable contribution of any person, period.

Captain Jerry Roberts, who worked with Turing at Bletchley Park and who was in a position to see firsthand exactly how his codebreaking interacted with the rest of the war effort, says “without him we would have lost the war.” Roberts told the BBC:

You have to understand the measure of what Turing did. Early in the war, in 1939, he had broken the Enigma used by the Luftwaffe and the German army but he’d been unable to break the naval Enigma.

In 1940/41 the German U-boats were sinking our food ships and our ships bringing in armaments left right and centre, and there was nothing to stop this until Turing managed to break naval Enigma, as used by the U-boats. We then knew where the U-boats were positioned in the Atlantic and our convoys could avoid them.

If that hadn’t happened, it is entirely possible, even probable, that Britain would have been starved and would have lost the war.

Of course Turing didn’t do the work at Bletchley Park single-handed. Mightn’t he be receiving credit that’s due to the entire team of men and women who worked there? There’s no doubt that every person who worked in the cryptography effort has a right to be immensely proud of the results of their work, but Roberts still insists that Turing’s role was essential:

Interviewer: A number of your colleagues were unsung heroes because of the secrecy surrounding the work of Bletchley Park. Should Alan Turing be singled out do you think?

Roberts: Yes, because without him, I and many people are convinced that we would have lost the war.

Even if you don’t take Churchill and Roberts at their literal word, it seems clear tht Turing’s contribution to the Nazi defeat would be hard to overstate . So on June 23, 2012 when you’re honouring Turing (as I know you will be), be thankful for your laptop, sure, and be grateful for your iPhone. They both rely on Turing’s pioneering work. But you might also want to be thankful that we’re not all living in one of those alternate histories where the Nazis won the war and established dominion over the world.

YouTube hosts a documentary called World War II, Mind of a Codebreaker, which documents some of what took place in that long ago time at Bletchley Park. The video quality is low, and it’s broken up into twelve pieces, but it’s well worth watching anyway. All parts are embedded below.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

Part Seven

Part Eight

Part Nine

Part Ten

Part Eleven

Part Twelve