Although a brilliant theoretician, Turing was often hopeless when it came to practical matters. His
impracticality showed itself in unusual ways: at his office, he chained his mug to the radiator to
prevent his colleagues from using it. They naturally regarded this as a challenge, picked the lock, and
drank from it wilfully. He routinely ran a dozen or more miles to distant appointments, arriving sticky
and exhausted, rather than use public transport. When war broke out in Europe in 1939, Turing
converted his savings into two silver ingots which he buried in the countryside for safety; by the end
of the war he was unable to remember where he cached them. Turing eventually committed suicide in
a characteristically impractical fashion: he ate an apple that he had injected with cyanide. And the test
which bears his name is a triumph of theory over practical experience. The difference between theory
and practice is a lot bigger in practice than in theory.
Postscript
Turing also wrote that he believed that "at the end of the century the use of words and general
educated opinion would have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking
without expecting to be contradicted." That actually happened much sooner than Turing reckoned.
Programmers habitually explain a computer 's quirks in terms of thought processes: "You haven't
pressed carriage return so the machine thinks that there's more input coming, and it's waiting for it."
However, this is because the term "think" has become debased, rather than because machines have
acquired consciousness, as Turing predicted.
Alan Turing was rightly recognized as one of the great theoretical pioneers in computing. The
Association for Computing Machinery established its highest annual prize, the Turing Award, in his
memory. In 1983, the Turing Award was given to Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson in recognition
of their work on UNIX and C.
Further Reading
If you are interested in learning more about the advances and limitations of artificial intelligence, a
good book to read is What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason by Hubert L.
Dreyfus, published by the MIT Press, Boston, 1992.
Chapter 6. Poetry in Motion: Runtime Data Structures
#41: The Enterprise meets God, and it's a child, a computer, or a C program.
#42: While boldly on the way to where only a few people have been recently, the Enterprise computer
is subverted by a powerful alien life-form, shaped amazingly like a human.
#43: Trekkers encounter hostile computer intelligence, and abuse philosophy or logic to cause it to
self-destruct.
#44: Trekkers encounter a civilization that bears an uncanny resemblance to a previous Earth society.
#45: Disease causes one or more crew members to age rapidly. Also seen in reverse: key crew
members regress to childhood, physically, mentally, or both.
#46: An alien being becomes embedded in body of a Trekker and takes over. Still waiting to see this
one in reverse...