Although I agree with you that Turing's death was an incredible loss, I wouldn't be so sure he would have died a natural death.

Turing had considered suicide before, during his failed work on the Riemann hypothesis. At that time, he schemed up a suicide mechanism involving an apple and electrical wiring which he described in a letter to an old boyfriend.

Turing was pretty eccentric, romanticized suicide (and was a little obsessed with this apple idea), and was in and out of depression.

Mind you, I agree. I'm just not so sure Turing ever would have died naturally.

He uh... also tried to poison his PhD advisor.

Hopefully someone will fix this misinformation soon, and gaddammit dude, when you're going to accuse someone of attempted murder, do a little fact check and send along a reference link or something for crissakkes

Whoops, you're right. I mixed him up with Oppenheimer.

You aren't thinking of Oppenheimer?

Whoops, you're right :/

You make it sound like he was murdered because he was gay. I don't think it was quite that clear cut.

I'm quite a believer in "if he hadn't done it, someone else would have" personally. I don't mean to belittle anyones contribution, but the idea that there's only one genius who can come up with something seems very unlikely to me.

Most inventions are 'discovered' by many people at around the same time.

Other people did do it, and even at nearly the exact same time. Turing just did it more convincingly. (See: Alonzo Church and the Lambda calculus).

And Turing helped a lot with the War effort, building hardware (i.e. stuff you can kick) as well as developing theories.

+1. Yeah, I was only thinking of his work on computation (not even AI!). I should have been more clear.

> You make it sound like he was murdered because he was gay. I don't think it was quite that clear cut.

Lets turn it around then. If he hadn't been gay, would he have been murdered?

> Most inventions are 'discovered' by many people at around the same time.

Yeah, this is true. Even revolutionary ideas seem to show up at multiple places at the same time. So it seems that the state of knowledge at the time of invention matters a great deal.

>If he hadn't been gay, would he have been murdered?

He committed suicide.

Anyone who has ever discovered anything surely knows this? The world is full of curious minds. This doesn't belittle this individual curious mind but honour the millions of others.

What if he'd just been an ordinary guy? I think the damage to his life and the lives of those who knew him is more important than what he would have invented.

Just to be clear, subjecting someone of lesser brilliance (99.9999999% of the population) to Turing's treatment would be equally immoral. Seriously destabilizing a suicidal person is murder and on a moral level I don't believe in claiming that a particular murder is more or less immoral than another. Murder is murder and I don't think you can compare magnitudes. So if he had been an ordinary guy, his murder would still have been wrong on a moral level. I'm simply arguing that in addition to the usual costs of murder (felt in large part by the deceased family), society has borne an additional cost.

Doesn't murder require intent? Are you saying that the government planned on destabili+ng him in order to make him commit suicide? Am I just thinking of murder 1?

I was using murder in a colloquial sense, not a legal one. I'm pretty sure in England the legal term for what was done to Turing is constructive manslaughter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manslaughter_in_English_law#Unl...). But IANAL.

>I'm pretty sure in England the legal term for what was done to Turing is constructive manslaughter.

The legal term would be something like "proper application of criminal law". You can't claim that it was constructive manslaughter to apply the law at the time.

That doesn't seem obvious to me. Inventions can change many lives, but the scope of a person's social life is necessarily limited. Why do you say that?

I don't think any amount of human suffering is really worth some perceived progress. Not only because the progress will likely come around eventually anyway if it's for the better, but if we're trying to better humankind we shouldn't start by harming even a single human.

Really? even Alexander Fleming before his accidental discovery of penicillin?

It's a fine line, but if the patients are willful participants then I guess that's a different story.

If they are not willful then I'm unmoved on my stance.

I've always assumed that Turing was bisexual, he certainly had a pretty intense relationship with his fiancee. I can't really understand how, if he was an openly gay man (as I've seen claimed) that he needed to make the confession that he did to his fiancee who he spent his leisure time and work time with; how is she couldn't know but everyone else did?

He also appeared to be an ephebophile. I have a hypothesis that his sexual liaisons with teenagers were an attempt to recapture his relationship with his (sole and very close) friend that died when he was at boarding school.

I didn't even know he was a homosexual. Nor does it matter.

It mattered a lot to him.

And the authorities at the time.