Spring 1947: ordered to Teddington to look, learn, and acquire, the author inspects the fastest computing machine in the world, which does not yet exist, and meets its designer, who is in training. The wire he sent home survives among the Sennett papers and is quoted below verbatim; it is the only report of his career recommending no action, and the editor has found nothing in it to correct. —Ed.
Sennett's promised names overtook the boat by wire, half a day out of New York: NPL DIRECTOR DARWIN, GRANDSON OF THE NATURALIST. WOMERSLEY RUNS MATHEMATICS, TALKS WELL. DESIGNER IS TURING. On the last name the wire spent not a word more, and I took that for thrift. It was ignorance, and I was six days from being cured of my share.
England that spring had to be seen to be believed. The boat train came up through bomb lots gone purple with fireweed; London stood in queues, grey and patched; bread was on the ration two years after the German surrender, an economy the Luftwaffe never managed to impose; and my hotel issued one scuttle of coal a day, with an apology for the extravagance. The town had won the greatest war in history and was taking no pleasure in it whatever. I set the eagle-stamped gyroscope on the strange desk in its grey sock, off the salt air at last, and slept in my overcoat like the rest of the victors.
Teddington is half an hour out of Waterloo, a suburb with a laboratory in it the size of a small college: brick, lawns, and a royal park over the wall with deer in it. The National Physical Laboratory weighs and measures for the Empire; the standard yard lives there, and the standard pound. Somewhere inside, on government money, the fastest computing machine on earth had been under construction for a year and a half, and did not exist.
Womersley received me, superintendent of the Mathematics Division, big, smooth, and glad of company; he ran his division the way a bishop runs a diocese: nothing moving, everything blessed. Money was calling, so the good sherry came out, and he talked forty minutes without endangering a fact. The ACE, he said, would leave the American machines standing. I asked to see it. I was given a stack of paper: circuit diagrams, mercury lines, instruction tables in a small strict hand. "The design is complete," he said. "Remarkably complete." "And the hardware?" "In hand." I had signed for enough of the Reich to know in hand in four languages; it means nowhere, ordered from nobody, and no man sacked for it yet. Construction proceeded, he explained, subject to the Executive Committee, which met quarterly to make certain nothing had happened since the previous quarter.1 I asked when metal would be cut; these things, he said, had their season.
They walked me down a corridor of linoleum the color of gravy and gave me the designer. He was thirty-five that year, strong-built and rumpled: flannels, a sports coat going at one elbow, tie knotted as an afterthought, the nails bitten to the quick. A tin mug hung chained to the radiator pipe; the theft of his tea he had provided against, and nothing else of his on earth, so far as I ever discovered. He did not stand up, and meant nothing by it. "You're the American," he said. The voice sat higher than the frame promised, with a small catch ahead of the load-bearing words, as though each sentence waited on clearance.
I opened with the standard issue, which has moved generals and Nobel men in their day: the honor, the reputation, the great paper of 1936 that had begun the whole business, the personal regards of Johnny von Neumann. He listened the way a man listens to the wireless giving weather for a county he doesn't live in. Then: "Which part of the paper did you find useful?"
"I'm told the whole of it is the foundation."
"You haven't read it. Why say you had?" No heat in it, no score being kept; it was a question, and he wanted the answer, and my mouth, which had not stood empty in public since Pasadena, stood empty.
"Because flattery is how I open," I said at last, bankrupt stock going for what it would fetch.
He considered that as though it were the first interesting thing I had said, which it was. "It isn't information, you see. It tells me nothing that could be tested." He looked at his watch and stood. "I run at half past twelve. If you want the machine, you may come. I shan't slow down; I'm in training."2
Set down the field conditions, for the student of the confidence trades: a decorated American liaison in a City suit and eight-dollar shoes, trotting across Bushy Park behind a man in shorts and a singlet, among deer that had seen everything since Charles the First and moved for nobody. I lasted three hundred yards. He ran ugly, elbows wide, head rolling, the breath going like a pump handle, and it ate ground the way tide eats a beach; when he saw I was blown he did not stop, he ran his circuit and came round again, and so I had him in installments, a lap at a time, standing under an oak with my hat in my hand.
Lap one went on my employers' business. What would the ACE do that Philadelphia's machines would not? "Ours is meaner," he said, circling me. "Cleverer in the instructions, less machinery; faster than theirs by a wide margin, on paper, and paper is where the committee will keep it." I tried the war, the mesa being my best card. "And your own war? I heard you were in it." "It's spent," he said, and that was the whole deposition. Then the bait that takes builders: the report that went round the world wearing one man's name, and none of it his; didn't that gall? He looked honestly puzzled, as though I had asked whether the deer galled him. "The ideas that matter are in my paper of '36. Anyone may have them; ideas aren't property, whatever your patent counsel ruled in April. The machine is what matters, and nobody will let me build the machine." Mark in passing: April's ruling had been ten men in a private room, and it had crossed the water faster than I had.
Lap two he came round and took the talk up mid-sentence, as though I were a problem left chalked overnight. "You keep asking what it will compute. That's the smallest part; arithmetic is what we sell the Treasury. The question worth anyone's while is whether a machine can learn."
"Learn," I said, minding my wind.
"As a child does. A child isn't born knowing; it tries, it is wrong, it is corrected, it improves. I want a machine that can be wrong. Everyone in that building wants a machine that is guaranteed, and if a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent. I said exactly that to the mathematicians in London in February, and they received it as wit.3 It was not wit. A machine of this kind will alter its own instructions as it learns, as you were altered by your schoolmasters; one day it will learn as fast as a man, and then rather faster, and the committee will still be asking for the guarantee." And he was off round the cedar.
Understand what was working on me, for it was not the prophecy; prophecy is sold to me weekly, by every uniform and both parties. It was that he meant it. I have passed my life among men who mean nothing, myself in the front rank, and the trade has a grammar: what the speech is for, the funding under the vision, the appointment under the funding. This speech was for nothing. It was what he had concluded, reported without ornament to whatever stood in the park, which was me and the deer. The needles I read men by have come back blank twice in my life, once in Chicago and once on a mesa, and both times I could at least see the shutters go up. Here there were no shutters. Nothing went in and nothing came out, and it was no defense; the instrument and I were simply not in the same trade.
Lap three I did my duty by the third word of my orders. He came by; I put my hand up; he stopped, jogging in place, steaming like a horse. I gave him both barrels: America, a laboratory of his own, engineers answering to nobody else, money in serious figures, and no committee this side of the Judgment. "I've been to America," he said. "The food is better. Johnny wanted to keep me at Princeton in '38, as his assistant, and I came home with the war coming. If I wouldn't stay for von Neumann I can't see why I'd cross for money.4 What would I buy? No, it's a real question. I have a bicycle. Books are cheap. The work is here or it is nowhere."
"Every man has a figure," I said, and gave him the smile that has closed contracts on four continents.
He looked at me then, quite still, the way a lens looks at you, and delivered the only sentence of that whole errand I have never improved in the retelling. "You say things entirely for their effect. Most people do it a little; you do it wholly. I've listened since noon, and there has not been a sentence in it for the thing itself. I can't make out what you do when you want to say a true thing." The small catch, the wait for clearance. "Perhaps it doesn't arise."
There was no malice in it, and no particular interest either; he had noticed me as a man notices a wrong figure in a column, corrected the record aloud, and was done. He said the marathon was in August and his time wanted three more minutes off it, and ran; and the deer lifted their heads and put them down again, and I stood in the middle of a royal park with my mouth empty for the second time in one day.
It was on the walk back to the gate that my nose went. The reader knows the instrument: it rang two days ahead of a certain desert tower and a certain tunnel in the Harz; it rings for ships, programs, cities; it has never been wrong, and it had never once gone off over one man running in an empty park. It went off then, watching him go small up the avenue of limes, elbows out, tireless, nothing about him locked. There was no building in it, no date, nothing so merciful as a schedule; only the smell that says ruin is patient and has the address, and the certainty that a century which is mostly locks does not forgive a man who goes through it unlocked, and that the bill, when it came, would be presented by smaller men. Two days is my usual notice. This read long, years long, and there was nothing in it to sell, nobody to warn who would have thanked me, and no door anywhere for me to be first out of. I have carried intelligence all my life and always found the buyer; I stood in that park holding some until the light went; there was no market, and there has never been one since.5
A man of my habits does not loiter in parks; I set it down so the reader may weigh it. I wired Sennett from London in clear, there being nothing in it worth a code: TEDDINGTON SEEN. MACHINE EXISTS ON PAPER ONLY. PAPER FIRST CLASS, LIKELY FASTER THAN OURS. COMMITTEE WILL STARVE IT QUARTERLY. NOTHING HERE TO ACQUIRE. DESIGNER NOT FOR SALE IN ANY CURRENCY, THREE TRIED. WHEN HE MOVES THE MACHINE MOVES WITH HIM. WATCH WHERE HE GOES. RECOMMEND NO FURTHER ACTION. It was the first report of my career with nothing in it for me, and Sennett smelled the difference, for the answer beat breakfast: SO NOTED. UNLIKE YOU. COME HOME, NEW BUSINESS CHICAGO. Johnny had told me down a telephone wire that the man did everything honestly and that I would find it worse. I had taken it for a Princeton epigram. It was a specification, and it ran short.
Bunny's Tuesday letter was at the hotel, forwarded through three addresses: the lake, her mother's roses, yours, Bunny. Only this Tuesday the board of one had allowed itself a fourth line. The Aldriches' Harry has been driving me to the club Fridays while the Packard is laid up. You would like him; he never says anything he does not mean. I sailed Saturday. Somewhere off Ireland I totted up the errand the way her father's people tot a quarter: sent to acquire; coming home with an empty manifest, a warning no exchange on earth would quote, and one letter run a line over its ration. A man should study his losses in order of size. I read the fourth line most of the way to New York.
The machine is the Automatic Computing Engine. Turing joined the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington in October 1945; his design report, "Proposed Electronic Calculator," was approved by the Laboratory's Executive Committee in March 1946, Sir Charles Darwin, grandson of the naturalist, directing, with J. R. Womersley superintending the Mathematics Division. Two years on, no machine had been started; the Laboratory had no electronics workshop and the committee would not create one. Turing left for Cambridge on sabbatical in the autumn of 1947 and resigned in 1948 for the University of Manchester, exactly the movement the author's wire advised watching for; the reduced Pilot ACE first ran on May 10, 1950, in his absence, and was then among the fastest machines in existence, as the paper had said all along. —Ed.
The training was serious. Turing ran for the Walton Athletic Club, whose secretary remembered the members hearing him before they saw him, "a terrible grunting noise," and then losing sight of him ahead. In the Amateur Athletic Association marathon championship of August 1947 he finished fifth, in two hours forty-six minutes and three seconds, roughly eleven minutes behind the time that would win the Olympic marathon in London the following summer; an injury in 1948 closed the Olympic question. Colleagues record him running the dozen and more miles to London meetings and arriving ahead of the men on the train, and his own explanation survives: the work stayed in his head, and running hard was the only way he knew to get it out. —Ed.
The lecture is in the record: to the London Mathematical Society, February 20, 1947, Turing proposed a machine that would learn from experience and alter its own instructions as it did so, and answered the demand for guarantees plainly, that "if a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent." His 1948 Laboratory report, "Intelligent Machinery," the founding paper of the field that now bears that name, was dismissed by the Director as a schoolboy's essay and stayed unpublished until 1968. The 1950 paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," with its learning child-machine and its imitation game, the reader will find quoted wherever the subject is discussed, which is now everywhere. —Ed.
Turing took his doctorate at Princeton in 1938 and declined von Neumann's offer of a post as his assistant, returning to England; his war service, about which the author could get nothing, was under statute and stayed there for nearly thirty years, and when it could at last be spoken of it proved to have been of a weight given to few men in any war. As to who was building whose machine: Stanley Frankel, who computed at Los Alamos and knew both men, later wrote that many hailed von Neumann as the father of the computer "but I am sure that he would never have made that mistake himself," von Neumann having firmly emphasized to him "that the fundamental conception is owing to Turing." The Princeton epigram, in short, was a citation. —Ed.
What the author says he smelled in Bushy Park, the editor will state once, plainly, as the record has it. Alan Mathison Turing, whose 1936 paper defined the universal machine on which every computer ever built has stood, was convicted in March 1952 of gross indecency under the statute of 1885 then criminalizing homosexual men; offered prison or probation conditional on a course of hormone injections, he took the injections, and his security clearance was withdrawn. He died at his house at Wilmslow on June 7, 1954, of cyanide poisoning, sixteen days short of his forty-second birthday; the inquest returned suicide. The British government apologized in 2009; a royal pardon followed in 2013. The editor adds nothing to the dates except this: the author read every man in these Papers and kept the ledger of what each was worth, and here met a man he could not read and an afternoon he could not sell, and carried both unsold for fifty years, and the deficiency, on the evidence of this number, was never Turing's. —Ed.