Manchester Digital Laboratory

Alan Turing

Title: Alan Turing and Morphogenesis
Location: MadLab
Description: To mark the publication of Litmus, Comma’s latest science-into-fiction project, Manchester’s Literature and Science Festivals present a unique event inspired by the life and work of one of Britain’s greatest scientists, Alan Turing.
Start Time: 14:00
Date: 2011-10-23
End Time: 16:00
Tickets: £5/£3 concessions

To mark the publication of Litmus, Comma’s latest science-into-fiction project, Manchester author Jane Rogers (recently long-listed for the Booker) and MMU scientist Martyn Amos discuss the final theorem of one of Britain’s greatest scientists, Alan Turing. Having invented the very concept of the computer in his 1936 paper ‘On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem’, then cracked the German Enigma codes and ‘contributed more to the defeat of the Nazis than Eisenhower’, and then gone on to coin the Turing Test concept for artificial intelligence, Turing set about a theory so ahead of its time it is only now finding empirical support, namely Morphogenesis.

This afternoon Jane Rogers reads her specially commissioned short story for Litmus and discusses the influences on Turing’s life as well as the wider relationship between science and literature with consultant scientist, Martyn Amos.

Part of the Manchester Science Festival and Manchester Literature Festival.

Tags: Alan Turing and Morphogenesis, commapress, Jane Rogers, Martyn Amos, MMU