Alan Mathison Turing: Breaking the Code, Watching the Daisies Grow

The Apple, the Enigma, the Spell of the Mind.

Symbols, codes and language are three very important key-words in Alan Mathison Turing's life. The English mathematician-cryptanalyst, father of the ‘informatics’ era, created the first calculator and died after eating an apple poisoned with cyanide, which is one of the many reasons why the apple is a symbol of his extraordinary life and scientific research.
Turing was a man who had the courage of naivety, who lived as an outsider to eventually venture out on an extraordinary scientific journey, which greatly impacted our contemporary life.
As an Englishman, he broke the moral code of British society, which damned him because of his homosexuality - he was put on trial and then forced to submit to a course of mammoth injections of oestrogen to “cure” him of his perverse habit.
As a code-breaker (cryptanalyst) in Blecthey Park, the ‘boffin’ centre of Foreign Office, he masterminded the cracking of the ‘German Enigma Code’ used by the Nazis to cipher their messages, thus signalling the end of the Second World War. The success was due to ‘Colossus’, the first electronic cryptanalyst machine, precursor of the modern computer.
Turing's ingenious insight, which would then lead to the creation of ‘artificial intelligence’, was understanding the fact that our brain doesn't work because of its particular bio-cellular tissue but because of its logical functioning - understood as a symbolic function of language. Thus, in order to create artificial intelligence, it was first necessary to mechanically reproduce this logical scheme or symbolic function using a different kind of matter.
Later, the informatics revolution would make it necessary to inquire even more deeply into our language and into what intelligence, thought, consciousness, reality, fantasy and freedom really mean.