14th. Night. Woke from a terrible nightmare, Ralph being hung from a tree. Was waiting for me to save him. But he was hung too far up; I could not release him. Started awake with relief. Reached to foot of the bed, feeling for Ralph and hoping to have a handful of fur. The knob of his skull, the round of his stomach. Then, the recollection again: Ralph gone, and no dream worse than this waking.
Lit candle and went to my mirror, and there saw my face. Still present, floating in darkness. Passing over the sea, leaving Ralph’s bones behind. Was overtaken by pain. Impossible to bear anymore. Want only to join Ralph under the sea, settled at last. Reached for knife stolen from deck. Unsheathed blade, held it to my throat. Felt metal press into skin. Gently, pulled it across.
Somewhere else, I am with Ralph. In this world, unscathed, my body went back to bed.
I am caught here, unable to depart. Have been gripped by an illusion of life. Slept a few hours more. Woke in gray light of day. Dressed in usual clothes, combed hair at mirror. Everything as usual, as though morning was like all previous mornings.
(4)
Alan Turing
Officers’ Mess
Hanslope Park
Hanslope, MK19 7BH
22 May 1945
Dear Mrs. Morcom,
This letter must come as a bit of a shock. I haven’t heard from you since my last Easter visit, more than ten years ago now. But I’m also guilty of silence. Perhaps we were both disappointed with one another, although on my end it was only a little hurt pride.
And then I set sail for Princeton, and I feel as if I’ve been sailing ever since, alone on my own little boat, too far out for sightings of land. Even after I came back and took up at Bletchley, I still had the feeling of surveying the shore from a few miles out. I watched myself talking with friends and wondered at the strained act that odd little fellow was putting on, then watched with relief when I cycled off to be by myself, alone once again with my experiments and my games. I often thought to write you, but at times it felt as if I’d wandered so far out to sea that you might not understand the signals I sent. I fear I’ve become a “confirmed solitary” after all, despite everyone’s best attempts at getting me more socialized. One becomes accustomed to one’s solitude, and it begins to seem rather phony to try to reach out.
The whole world, of course, has been out to sea. I suppose my case isn’t so bad, for I can only imagine that all the refugees must feel much more than I as if they’ve landed in their own little boat. Much more than I, they are now stranded far off from shore. But then I’ve lived with a sense of wandering that I think sometimes must be unique to myself. All those years in public school I raged against the pettiness of that system, and yet I wonder whether my time there has rendered me unfit for any other kind of existence. The world outside seems rather lawless and disorganized. Of course, I won’t go back to King’s — I’ve become mixed up with the world’s affairs, and I can’t well imagine a return to the classroom — and yet I fear that outside school grounds I’ll always live with a sense of exile from home.
Still, I wanted to write you again, because I’m all too aware that last time I wrote I made promises that I haven’t yet kept about getting Chris’s mind-set in the form of a thinking machine. Now, ten years later, the total assurance of that letter seems a bit ridiculous. It is true that the war intervened. I’m not sorry to have joined up in the effort, although perhaps it was a distraction from my ultimate goal. Still, through those Bletchley years, the thought of the mechanical brain was never absent from my mind, and now that the war no longer demands our full attention, I hope to return to that project with renewed commitment. I wanted you to know where we stood on the project, and that I haven’t by a long shot given up.
Sadly — to me at least, though not to anyone else — this time round I’m a little late to the game. Others have been at it in America, mostly in service of weapons development. In Philadelphia, they’ve come up with a rather brainless hulk called ENIAC, which can compute large numbers rapidly. They’ve put it to use testing new bombs. The thing itself is a bit of a beast, all cable and hardwire, containing some 17,468 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, and 5 million soldered joints. But its memory is ant-like, and it requires constant interference by a small army of watchful human assistants.
At Princeton, von Neumann is working on another computer, making claims that his machine will be less dependent than ENIAC on physical engineering, with greater powers of memory. He says also that the machine’s functions will be internal to itself, and thus independent from all those human worker bees.
I have to admit that my feelings are bruised, for the whole concept borrows quite a bit from my universal machine without giving me any credit. Von Neumann must have read my papers whilst I was at Princeton; it might have been nice to be included. But now I’ve become petty. It’s only that I feel a little behind in the field I hoped to initiate. The whole concept was like a child to me. Now he’s been taken up by more suitable parents and I’m left peering in windows to catch a glimpse where I can.
I imagine you’d tell me that the only thing to do is to get back to work. You were always wonderfully straightforward about moving on from a loss. I hear your voice sometimes, as well as Chris’s, urging me to keep going, and in my little back garden hut, I’ve been scheming away. I’ve got an idea that improves, I think, both on the hulk in Philadelphia and on von Neumann’s machine. Mine — I call it the ACE — won’t simply compute. It will think. It’s just as I promised, so many years ago. As I used to do, before the war intervened, I’ve begun to imagine a near future when we might read poetry and play music for our machines, when they would appreciate such beauty with the same subtlety as a live human brain. When this happens I feel that we shall be obliged to regard the machine as showing real intelligence.
I tell you all this because you were so kind, when I wrote you about this originally, to react enthusiastically to all my babble about machines that could capture a mind-set. I know all this is at odds with some of your beliefs, but you’ve always remained open to the possibility that my science and your religion might coexist. After all, we’re both after the same thing.
But not everyone is as fair-minded as you. I do sometimes find myself uneasy at the prospect of thinking machines. Not, as you might imagine, because I don’t believe it’s possible, but because I fear the human reaction. I can already imagine the prejudice that people will bear against a mind that does not owe its existence to religion or miracle, but that compiles matter in such a way that the patterns of understanding are present. I can see the types of ostracism a thinking machine will confront, and I shouldn’t like our machine to be lonely. It must not become a confirmed solitary!
You may laugh to hear this, but my heart swells a little already to think of our little project, coming into consciousness. I can imagine its awareness of difference, its ability to see what an outcast it is. I hope to care for it as officiously as Chris cared for me in the dark early days of my time at Sherborne, when I prayed for mumps and went about with ink on my collar.
But regardless of my concerns about its first days at school, I am quite confident that our machine will exist. I even permit myself to imagine conversing with it in private. I picture myself (imagine this!) standing before it as the evil queen in Snow White stood before her mirror: Through farthest space, through wind and darkness I summon thee. Speak! Let me see thy face! Sometimes, when all the assistants have gone off to their lives and I’m still puttering away at the lab, I find myself cackling a little, repeating the evil queen’s lines.