Alan Turing Centenary
@
Swansea University

A Public Engagement Afternoon

Distinguished Lecture by Martin Campbell-Kelly
5pm, Wednesday 5th December 2012, Faraday Lecture Theatre, Faraday Building

Tea and Coffee will be available before the lecture, which starts at 5:30pm
The talk will be followed by a reception.

Professor Martin Campbell-Kelly's lecture is on Alan Turing’s Other Universal Machine: The ACE. The ACE (Automatic Computing Engine) was an electronic digital computer which Turing designed at the National Physical Laboratory after finishing his code-breaking activity at Bletchley Park. Professor Campbell-Kelly will describe the genesis of the ACE from Turing’s On Computable Numbers paper of 1936 and John von Neumann’s EDVAC Report of 1945, and its role in the shaping the early computer industry. The ACE was an electronic digital computer which Turing designed at the National Physical Laboratory after finishing his code-breaking activity at Bletchley Park.

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Swansea Science Cafe event To Kill A Machine
7:30pm, Wednesday 5th December 2012, Fulton House Café West

Scriptography Productions presents a new full-length play by Catrin Fflur Huws about the wartime code-breaker Alan Turing, whose pioneering work considered whether a machine could think.

If a machine can think, what then is the difference between a human and a machine? And if a human is prevented from thinking, does he then become a machine?

At the heart of the play is a powerful love story which questions the meaning of humanity, and the importance of freedom. The play commemorates the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth and considers how these questions are played out in relation to his own life and death.


The author and the producer of the play will be available after the performance for questions.


Here a production photograph showing Gwydion Rhys as Alan Turing, Ceri Murphy as The Betray and Stephen Marzella as The Interogator.

Exhibition of the Alan Turing Posters
Wednesday 5th December 2012

For the whole afternoon, a poster exhibition will be on display. The posters will show Alan Turing as a person in his early and final years leading to his tragic death, as well as his main contributions to science and society.

These posters of pictures from the archives of King’s College, Cambridge were composed by the Archive Centre of King’s College. The final design and printing was made possible by the financial support of IOS Press, Amsterdam.

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