Society both fosters and represses genius. There are many instances where technology could have advanced farther if prejudices had not come in the way.

Spare a thought then for Alan Turing. He was the founder of computer science, a mathematician, a philosopher, and codebreaker who helped end World War II much earlier, and who believed he could invent an artificial intelligence computer. Who knows what may have happened to the development of the computer if Turing had not taken his own life in 1954 owing to the stigma attached to homosexuality at the time.

Perhaps we would have been way ahead in the development of smarter computers.

Perhaps not. But Turing's life illustrates what can happen to technological development when humans get in the way.

Turing was born 1912 in Paddington, London, and began studying relativity at Cambridge University. He went on to study quantum mechanics, probability, and logic, which led him on to think about the first computer in 1931.

He approached it from a more philosophical bent. How can the human mind be embodied in matter? He came up with the conception of a computer.

"Seizing on the idea of a process applied mechanically, he formulated the concept of a machine working on a paper tape on which symbols were printed, and asked what was the most general type of process such a machine could perform,'' says Andrew Hodges a mathematician who has written several books on Turing's achievements.

Turing said the workings of this conceptual machine were equivalent to what a person could achieve working on a set of logical instructions. His concept became known as the Turing machine, one in which there is a piece of hardware running on a set of instructions which could be changed to get it to do different things.

He then took this thought further with the concept called the Universal Turing machine. What if, he asked, a machine could be invented which could be made to do what any other particular Turing machine could do, by supplying it with a set of data describing each individual machine. This was the genesis of the development of the computer: Hardware and an interchangeable set of instructions which could be modified.

It was still a creation of the mind, but Turing saw it could be brought into physical being. But first came World War II. He began working for the British cryptanalytic department at Bletchley Park attempting to break the German Enigma code used in German naval communications.

He developed sophisticated statistics to crack the code, which was developed along with other brilliant minds into the Colossus machine. The machine is credited with helping end the war two years early. He was awarded the OBE for his efforts.

At Bletchley Park Turing learned how electronics could be used on a large scale to make practical machinery. He learned electronics and began planning to make a Universal Turing Machine, a digital computer.

After the war he began developing the Automatic Computing Engine at the National Physical Laboratory. He created the most detailed design then in existence for a computer.

"Turing projected a computer able to switch at will from numerical work to algebra, codebreaking, file handling, or chess-playing,'' wrote Mr. Hodges.

"An explicit example of a subroutine pointed towards the building of a software library. A later talk (February 1947) depicted a national computer centre with remote terminals, and the prospect of the machine in time taking over programming work. In 1947 his Abbreviated Code Instructions marked the beginning of programming.'' However the machine was not built due to funding difficulties. He ended up writing a paper on neural nets, in which he discussed how a mechanical system could learn. M.H.A. Newman, at Manchester University, the first reader of Turing's paper On Computable Numbers, instead took the credit for developing the world's first computer, the Mark I at Manchester University in 1948.

Turing meanwhile decided to go cross-country running, and became a serious contender to represent the British team in the 1948 Olympic Games until he injured himself. His ideas lay unrecognised and undeveloped in various papers.

Others took up the mantle of fame.

He was hired at Manchester and turned his attention to morphogenesis, the theory of growth and form in biology. He was the first to use an electronic computer for mathematical research. He remained focused on artificial intelligence but he turned it to the problem of how biological growth occurs.

His computer simulations of growth were later recognised in the 1960s as the first steps toward chaos theory.

Then in 1952 disaster struck Turing. He was arrested for being a homosexual, something he had never hidden. Instead of going to prison he decided to take the other alternative offered by the court. He began injections of oestrogen, essentially chemically castrating himself.

He continued his scientific work, but he was now excluded from Bletchley Park because he could no longer get security clearance. Shut off from his colleagues and a chance to develop his artificial intelligence machine he grew bitter.

On June 8 1954, he loaded an apple with cyanide and ate it. Before that he wrote a little logical plea to the world, which shows how well he understood his fate: "Turing said machines could think.

Turing was alluring.

Therefore machines could not think.'' It's a sad commentary on society. But at least he had a remarkable life and he remains recognised for his contribution to the computer industry.

For further reading on Turing's life try Alan Turing: the Enigma by Andrew Hodges. He also has a good web site on Turing at wadham.ox.ac.uk/ $ ahodges/Turing.html.

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