Turing Award: Top prize in computing, named after codebreaker

Apart from the award, the Turing machine, used in computing, is named after the pioneer who is considered the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.

Alan Turing at age 16

On Wednesday, three pioneers in artificial intelligence — a senior Google executive, Facebook’s chief AI scientist, and an academic — were announced as the winners for this year’s A M Turing Award (The Indian Express, March 28). It is often described as the “Nobel Prize for computing”.

Why Turing

The award is named after British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Mathison Turing (1912-54), whose work in codebreaking is credited with having played a decisive role in World War II. He led a British team that worked out a way to decrypt intercepted messages, which had been encrypted on Enigma machines developed by the Germans. Apart from the award, the Turing machine, used in computing, is named after the pioneer who is considered the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.

Turing never received full recognition for his efforts because he was a homosexual, which was then a crime in the UK. Prosecuted in 1952, he committed suicide in 1954. His work and life are the theme of the film The Imitation Game (2014), in which Benedict Cumberbatch plays Turing.

The award

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Given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the A M Turing Award carries $1 million as prize money. As described on the ACM website, it is “for major contributions of lasting importance to computing”. First awarded in 1966, it has been awarded annually for 53 years so far to 70 recipients. These include 3 women, the first of these having won in 2006.

This year’s winners are Google vice president and senior fellow Geoffrey E Hinton, Facebook’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, and University of Montreal professor Yoshua Bengio, who is also scientific director at the Artificial Intelligence Institute in Quebec. The ACM website describes their award-winning work as “conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing”.

The three worked on neural networks, a component of robotic systems that are automating a wide range of human activity, such as driving. These deep neural networks are good at speech and image recognition. It was because of the growing power of deep learning that Hinton and LeCun were recruited by Google and Facebook, MIT Technology Review reported. LeCun has led an effort within Facebook to develop not just powerful image and video recognition capabilities but also more capable personal assistants, it said.