Alan Turing was born this day, June 23, in 1912. The composition I wrote in tribute to him, “Codebreaker,” opens Disc 2 of Dynamic Maximum Tension.
It is almost impossible to overstate the influence Alan Turing has had on the world we live in. He invented the conceptual model for modern computers, the Universal Turing Machine. He is a foundational figure in the field of artificial intelligence, and his famous Turing Test remains the mental framework we use when we ask ourselves, as Turing did, “Can machines think?” He proved that it’s literally impossible for a computer to detect in advance whether a set of code will result in an infinite loop (i.e., the spinning wheel of death). He is one of the foundational figures of cognitive science. While a visiting fellow at Princeton, he originated the field of ordinal logic.
Any one of these accomplishments would have made him a titan of science. But Turing lives on in the popular imagination because of his role as a World War 2 codebreaker: the man who cracked the supposedly uncrackable Enigma cipher used by the German navy. This was the code that the infamous U-boat wolfpacks used to coordinate their massed attacks on the convoys bound for Britain. Turing was part of the team of codebreakers assembled at Bletchley Park, a beautifully ragtag bunch that included soldiers and civilians, gay men (like Turing), women, socialists, anarchists, Jews, immigrants, and foreigners. Among them were cryptanalysts, linguists, poets, chess-players, musicians, and crossword puzzle experts — in fact, many were recruited via a cryptic crossword challenge published in The Telegraph.
Turing used the power of computing to crack the naval Enigma code, which was changed daily. He devised a machine called the Bombe, an electro-mechanical device that could run 36 Enigma machines in parallel. The machine searched for a match for a “crib,” a known phrase that was likely to appear in the intercepted naval transmissions — like “alles klar,” for instance. The Bombes were big devices — seven feet wide, six and a half feet tall — and incredibly loud.
By late April 1941, with the help of an intact Engima device and secret papers captured in a commando raid on the German trawler Krebs, Turing’s Bombe was able to quickly decode the day’s intercepted Engima transmissions. This gave the Allies a key advantage in the Battle of the Atlantic and paved the way for the Normandy landings. Many historians estimate that by breaking naval Enigma, Turing hastened Hitler’s eventual defeat by two full years or more, saving millions of lives in the process.
After the war, Turing’s activities at Bletchley Park remained classified. No one outside of British intelligence knew what he had done to win the war and ensure the defeat of the fascist powers. Turing went on to design the earliest electronic computers in Britain, for the National Physical Laboratory in London and the Computing Machine Laboratory in Manchester. He designed programming systems and wrote the first-ever programming manual. In 1950 he wrote his famous paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” in which he proposes the Turing test as a benchmark for artificial intelligence. The following year he was elected to the Royal Society, Britain’s storied national scientific academy.
On January 23, 1952, Turing arrived home to discover there had been a break-in at his house. Turing’s biographer Andrew Hodges writes “a rather pathetic collection of oddments was missing – a shirt, some fish-knives, a pair of trousers, some shoes and shavers and a compass – even an opened bottle of sherry. He assessed it at a total value of £50.” Turing reported the burglary to the police, and during the course of their interrogation, he let slip that he suspected the culprit was an acquaintance of his gay lover, Arnold Murray. Homosexuality was a crime in the UK at the time (and would remain so until 1967), and the officers arrested Turing for “gross indecency,” the same crime for which Oscar Wilde had been imprisoned a half-century earlier. Turing was publicly disgraced and stripped of his security clearance. After pleading guilty, he was offered the choice between prison and a hormonal “treatment” that amounted to chemical castration. He chose the latter, but it caused him enormous physical anguish and depression. At the age of 41, he took his own life, by taking a bite of a cyanide-laced apple.
Among Turing’s many discoveries, this may seem like a minor one, but I found it fascinating: he was the first to note that the number of spirals found on the head of a sunflower are always numbers from the Fibonacci sequence. No matter how you count the spirals, the total is always a Fibonacci number: 34, 55, or 21.
This discovery of Turing’s is at the heart of “Codebreaker”: every musical detail (rhythm, melody, harmony, formal structure, etc) is derived from the Fibonacci sequence. That may sound like a lot of math (and it is), but as with any technique I use — the 12-tone rows of Real Enemies, the all-interval tetrachords of “All In” — the point is not to draw attention to the way it’s made, but to make the technique invisible. I wanted “Codebreaker” to sound like music, not math; and more than that, like music that is at least adjacent to the classic big band jazz that was at the very peak of its popularity during the time Turing was at Bletchley Park.
It’s a challenging piece — without question the most difficult tune in the Secret Society book! — but I hope when people listen, they aren’t thinking about that. Instead, I hope they’re swept up in flow of the musical narrative, and the searing energy of Rob Wilkerson’s alto solo. At any rate, I hope “Codebreaker” feels like a worthy tribute to one of the most significant minds of the 20th century.
More DMT Inspirations:
Duke Ellington
Bob Brookmeyer
Mae West
Laurie Frink
Buckminster Fuller