David Leavitt holds Turing's school reports during filming at the Sherborne School archive.

Part of CODEBREAKER focuses on the time that Alan Turing spent at Sherborne School, a boarding school in Dorset, England.  Turing attended the school from 1926 until he started at King’s College, Cambridge in 1931.  The film features newly uncovered information about the books he checked out between 1928 & 1931.  The list offers clues about Turing’s early intellectual development.

Sherborne Archivist Rachel Hassall discovered the information in old log books from the Sherborne school library.  The list of books Turing checked out includes, The Nature of the Physical World, Alice in Wonderland, and The Game of Logic. Author Alex Bellos summarizes Hassall’s research on his blog.

Hassall also has compiled transcripts from the school report cards that Turing received from his teachers at Sherborne .  A Natural Science instructor said, “He is keen & has a natural bent for science, but his work is badly spoilt by extreme untidiness.”  Turing’s mathematics teacher wrote, “He has considerable powers of reasoning and should do well if he can quicken up a little and improve his style.”

After examining the school reports at Sherborne’s archive room, Turing biographer  David Leavitt told us, “His teachers didn’t recognize they had a tremendous mathematical genius in their midst.”

Here’s how the book is described on  Amazon.com: “’It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,’ twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936.  In Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson focuses on a small group of men and women, led by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who built one of the first computers to realize Alan Turing’s vision of a Universal Machine. Their work would break the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things—and our universe would never be the same.’”

The Wall Street Journal’s review of the book says, “Though Turing lends his name to the title of George Dyson’s detailed and engaging Turing’s Cathedral, it is von Neumann who is the book’s central figure.  Mr. Dyson focuses on the story of the men and women that von Neumann brought to the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, to create the ‘Turing machine’ that Mr. Dyson argues is the nucleus of today’s digital universe.”

Here’s a review from The Telegraph.

Pearl told US News & World Report, “I think the voice recognition systems that we constantly use, as much as we hate them, are miraculous. They’re not flawless, but what we have shows it’s feasible and could one day be flawless. There’s the chess-playing machine we take for granted. A computer can beat any human chess player. Every success of AI becomes mundane and is removed from AI research. It becomes routine in your job, like a calculator that performs arithmetic, winning in chess—it’s no longer intelligence.”  Read more.

The Independent reports, “Mr. Stewart called on the Government to consider ‘whether it would be appropriate to grant him a pardon for the so-called crime of which he was convicted.’

“Responding to the question in the Commons, Sir George said, ‘I understand that an application for a royal prerogative of mercy was put forward on the basis that the offence should not have existed, but sadly one cannot give a royal prerogative on those particular grounds.  The argument that it should not have been an offence in the first place is not normally a ground for prerogative.’”

Read more.

The exhibition is called The Life and Works of Alan Turing.  The exhibition was officially opened on Monday.  Read more from The Guardian.

The Telegraph reports on new research, unveiled in the current issue of Nature Genetics. “In his 1952 paper The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis, the code breaker proposed that animals’ stripes and spots are caused by the interaction of a pair of chemicals, dubbed ‘morphogens’.

“One of the chemicals, he suggested, triggered cell activity, while the other hindered it. The way in which they interact would dictate where cells grow, creating familiar patterns on the fur of animals.

“While scientists have been able to simulate Turing’s theory using computer models, for the first time scientists have identified the exact chemicals in action.”  Read more.

The Mail has reaction from Dr. Jeremy Green from the Department of Craniofacial Development at King’s Dental Institute. He said, “As this year marks Turing’s centenary, it is a fitting tribute to this great mathematician and computer scientist that we should now be able to prove that his theory was right all along!”  Read more.

Professor Barry Cooper, Chair of the Turing Centenary Committee, tells The Guardian he supports the effort.  ”A pardon from the Government in the centenary year of Turing’s birth would be warmly welcomed by his family, friends, colleagues and those in the scientific community who have benefited from the foundations he laid.”

Not everyone supports the effort for this pardon.  John Graham-Cumming organized the successful 2009 petition to seek an apology for Turing from the Government.  “A pardon for simply Turing would be unjust to other gay men who suffered under the law,“ says Graham-Cumming.  “There are men alive today living in Britain with a criminal record because of offences committed during the time the law was in force.”

Actor Stephen Fry said, “Turing needs no pardon. He did no wrong other than break a wicked law.”  Read more.

The Times describes the film as “…an overdue and thoroughly honourable telling of this dreadful story.”  Another critic says the film was “awe-inspring.”  The Sunday Times calls it “powerful” and “imaginative.”   Check out more news coverage of the film.