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作者按：广受赞誉的密码破译者艾伦图灵毫无疑问是上世纪拥有最杰出才智的人之一，但我们也应该记住，他所取得的成就并不仅仅是一场独角戏的结果。 6月23日是图灵的100年诞辰，同时距离他的逝世也越过了58个年头。图灵的死在当时的媒体界仅激起了些许涟漪，而如果他不是以这样特殊的方式死去，或许连那一点点涟漪都不会有。 1954年6月11日的每日邮报以《床边的毒苹果》为题报导了图灵的死，其中包括了法医的调查结果，称这位独居的单身汉在情绪失衡后以一个浸过氰化物的毒苹果结束了自己的生命。尽管图灵被誉为英国最杰出的数学家之一，他的名声还远没有大到登上报纸头条的地步，每日邮报的这则新闻，也仅仅在一页几十则新闻中占据了其中的几个版面，不过比起很多其他全国性报纸，每日邮报虽然简短，却至少报导了他的逝世。 时间快进到现在，图灵已经不再是一个死得比活着更引人关注的人，而是人们要用一整年来纪念其成就和影响的数学家。2012年被官方宣布为图灵年，全世界约50个国家和组织举行了各式活动纪念图灵，包括展览、会议、电视和收音节目，英国甚至为他发行了特别版邮票。他临终时床边的那个苹果，也成了继砸在牛顿头上的苹果之后科学界最著名的一颗。有人声称图灵做毒苹果是为了效仿他最喜爱的童话——白雪公主里面的那颗，而且不断有传闻说苹果公司著名的被咬了一口的苹果就是由此而来的。尽管据作家兼演员兼主持人的技术爱好者Stephen Fry说，当苹果公司创建者乔布斯被他问到这个传闻是不是真的时，他回答：“这不是真的，但上帝啊，我们多希望它是真的！” 现代英雄 图灵之所以当今被人们如此看重有着很多合理原因。他是二战期间布莱切利园密码破译的领军人物（译者：二战时，布莱切利园曾经是英国政府进行密码解读的主要地方）。他开发了用以破译极端复杂的德军恩尼格玛秘密码的机电装置——“图灵甜点”，最终造就了第一台计算机的诞生。而随着那些包裹在他成就周围的层层谜团被逐渐剥开，人们得以在多年以后一窥其全景。或许还有一个因素，尽管这个因素在他身前显然没有起到作用：战争过后，这位“独居的单身汉”——很多当年的每日邮报读者一定读懂了这个暗示他是同性恋的说法——因他的性向遭受迫害并被化学阉割以致他可能为此在年仅41岁时选择结束自己生命，这样不公正的对待引起了众怒，30000人联名上书要求政府对此道歉，2009年，英国首相布朗发表了明确的致歉声明，称图灵遭到如此残忍的对待令人寒心。 这些解释了大半为什么我们现在过着“图灵年”，但不止于此。从以前遭受不公对待默默无闻，到今日收到如潮般赞誉，图灵已然变成一个有吸引力的，带着神话色彩的现代科学英雄了，这吸引力不仅从他自身优秀而来，还归功于由他衍生而出的作品创作。 除开基于他的人生际遇创作的戏剧和电视剧，在斯蒂芬森的经典科幻小说《编码宝典》中亦有着以图灵为原型的小说角色；在罗伯特哈里斯小说的电影版《迷》中，他显然是破译者汤姆杰里科这个角色的主要灵感来源——汤姆果断是双性恋（这两者在原作小说中区分度更高一点），他甚至还在英国成人讽刺漫画杂志先锋 Viz的连环画里做了一下配角。 这一切并没有什么问题，甚至只要实事求是地描述这个科学家，很大层面上是好的，但这其实是一把双刃剑，而我们已经开始将那些虚构的东西当做图灵真实的人生了。 图灵常被誉为“计算机之父”，或“计算机科学之父”、或者“人工智能之父”，有时候三者兼有。作为大多数人唯一熟知的布莱切利园破译者，图灵经常被描述为完全无需他人协助就破解了恩尼格玛密码机的人。而且人们总是说，如果没有了图灵，我就不可能像现在这样码字，你也不知到哪里看我码的字了 那些说法说真亦真，说假亦假，这听上去可能像要破解恩尼格玛一样让人云里雾里，但事实确是如此，正如我之前写到的，我们只是喜欢这位许多年前天才的传奇故事。图灵或许是“一个人住”，但他不是一个人工作的。比如他著名的破译机“图灵甜点”是经过数学家戈登威尔士曼和工程师哈罗德调整而成的，之所以叫图灵甜点（Bombe）也是因其基于波兰密码学家的破译机Bomba研发而成。 图灵是主角，这点无可非议，但整场戏并非一场独角戏。声称图灵是计算机和人工智能之父这点更加值得质疑，首先计算机和人工智能都有很多个“爹”（还有几个“妈”），但即使没有了图灵做的贡献，你真的觉得我们会没有相类似的电脑用吗？ 因此我们可能需要一种不一样的图灵测试，不用以区分人类和机器人，而是让我们在塑造科学英雄时，分清事实和虚构，不忘多数科学进步集体协作的本质。毫无疑问，图灵是上世纪拥有最杰出才智的人之一，但将他的成就放于聚光灯下的同时，不应将其合作者的贡献隐入更深的阴影处。
Acclaimed code-breaker Alan Turing was undoubtedly one of the greatest minds of the last century but we should always remember his achievements were not a one man show, says Quentin Cooper.
It’s exactly 100 years since the birth of Alan Turing. And just over 58 years since his death. An event which left scarcely a ripple in the media of the time, and which might have left none at all had it not been for the manner in which it happened. Under the headline “Death Apple By His Bed”, the Daily Mail of 11 June 1954 covered the coroner’s findings that this “bachelor” who “lived alone” committed suicide by means of a cyanide soaked apple while the balance of his mind was disturbed. Although he is described as “one of Britain’s most brilliant mathematicians”, Turing’s name was not remotely well enough known to make it into the headline, and the piece takes up barely a couple of column inches, one of dozens of stories on that page alone. Brief as the Mail’s account was, they did more than most other national papers in at least reporting that Turing had died. Fast forward to now, and Turing has gone from being a man whose life was seen as less interesting than his death, to one requiring 12 months to celebrate his achievements and influence. 2012 has been declared “Alan Turing Year” with an official organising committee and events across some 50 countries and organisations. There are exhibitions, conferences, TV and radio programmes, even a special UK postage stamp. That apple by his deathbed has become the most famous in science since Isaac Newton’s windfall, with claims that Turing poisoned it so he could mimic the one in his favourite fairy-tale, Disney’s Snow White, and – repeatedly – that it inspired Apple’s famous once-bitten logo. Although writer/actor/presenter/technophile Stephen Fry says that when he asked Apple founder Steve Jobs if the story is true, Jobs replied “It isn’t true but God, we wish it were”. ''Modern hero’ There are many reasonable reasons why Turing is now so highly regarded. It helps he was a leading figure in the World War II code-breaking work at Bletchley Park: he developed the electromechanical “Bombe” which deciphered messages sent using the fiendishly complex German Enigma machines, work which ultimately led to the first computers. It also helps that over the years the layers of secrecy which surrounded much of what he did have steadily been stripped away, only belatedly allowing the full magnitude of his accomplishments to be appreciated. And it perhaps helps, although it certainly did not during his lifetime, that after the war this “bachelor” who “lived alone” – which many Daily Mail readers of the time would have correctly taken to imply he was homosexual – was subjected to persecution, prosecution and ultimately chemical castration, which may have led him to take his own life while still only 41. Such was the widespread anger at this injustice that 30,000 people signed a petition calling for a government apology, and in 2009 then Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an unequivocal one, saying that it was horrifying Turing had been treated “so inhumanely”. All of this goes a long way to explaining why we find ourselves in the middle of Alan Turing Year. But not quite all the way. Having been propelled from unfair obscurity to unlimited acclaim, Turing has now reached that most attractive and semi-mythic status of a modern science hero. Attractive as in desirable, but also attractive as in things keep being drawn towards him. Besides various plays and TV dramas based on his life, a fictionalised version of Turing turns up as a character in Neal Stephenson’s classic geek novel Cryptonomicon; he’s clearly a major inspiration for the character of the - resolutely heterosexual - cryptographer Tom Jericho in the film of Robert Harris’ Enigma (the two are more distinct in the book), and he even managed a cameo cartoon strip appearance in inventively sweary British adult comic, Viz.
Which would all be fine and even largely good in terms of depicting scientists positively, if it weren’t that this is a two-way process and we’ve begun to accept fantasy elements as being facts about Turing’s life. Turing is now regularly described as being the “father” of computing. Or of computing science. Or artificial intelligence. Sometimes all three. As the only name most of us are familiar with among the code-breakers at Bletchley Park, he is often depicted as if he unraveled the secrets of the Enigma machine entirely unaided. And it’s often said that without him, what I’m writing this on (and in all likelihood you’re reading it on) would not exist. None of that is entirely a lie. None of it is really true . Which may sound like an attempt at an enigma, but it’s not. As I have written before, we are fond of the myth of the lone genius. Turing may have “lived alone” but he didn’t work alone. His famous code-breaking Bombe, for instance, benefitted from tweaking by mathematician Gordon Welchman and engineer Harold Keen. And it got its name because it was itself based on an earlier device to crack the Enigma ciphers called the Bomba developed by Polish cryptologists. Unquestionably he played the leading role – but it was not a one man show. And the claims about Turing being the big daddy of computing and artificial intelligence are even more questionable: both have many fathers (and a few mothers) and even without his considerable input does anyone really think we would not have computers very similar to the ones we now use? So perhaps we need a different kind of Turing test – not one that can aid us in telling machine from human, but one which enable us to discriminate between the facts and fictions as our desire to have science heroes risks us forgetting the collective, collaborative nature of most scientific advances. Turing was undoubtedly one of the greatest minds of the last century, but shedding light on his achievements shouldn’t involve plunging all those he worked with into the shadows. 自1912年6月23日出生的那天起，艾伦·麦席森·图灵似乎就注定要遭受孤独、误解和迫害之痛。随着他的百年诞辰的到来，《自然》杂志称赞他是有史以来最具科学思想的人物之一。这期特刊囊括了图灵的不可胜数的成就，从他最著名的角色-----战时密码破译员和计算机科学的创始人，到他那些鲜为人知的兴趣，如植物学、神经网络、无组织机、量子物理学，以及鬼魂研究等。
每个人都能看到一个不同的图灵。也许，你会吃惊的听到一位分子生物学家说，图灵最重要的文章是其1936年在“图灵机”上的工作，因为这和基于DNA的细胞活动相关。而生物物理学家可能会指出图灵1952年对生物形态发生的研究，是有史以来发表的第一篇对非线性动力学进行了模拟。 在这一切之下，有一个驱动图灵的梦想就是----用计算机编程的方式或许能复活克里斯托弗·摩尔康的灵魂，摩尔康可能是图灵唯一的真心朋友，但在他们都还是少年时就突然去世了。图灵说，“''我想重建一个大脑’”。电生理学家亨利·马克拉姆也试图如此。但是仍然存在争议的是，机器智能是否应该忠实地模拟神经环路，或者只是单纯地计模仿大脑的功能。 即使在图灵忙于紧张的战时密码破译和他的图用计算机设想的实际验证，他从未忘记，在1936年，他发现了一个更伟大的东西：不可计算理论。当代物理学家依然还没有真正了解这一发现的本质。
这正是典型的图灵式辉煌和乐趣，即使他已经给如此多的领域创造了工具，使之繁荣昌盛，他仍然仅仅通过植入一个概念，就将我们所熟知的科学---物理实在性和牛顿的因果律---推进了万丈深渊。
 《自然》推出的纪念专辑内容包括：
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