Turing often used his skill to find ways for creating artificial intelligence, or AI. He wrote many papers that are now standard for the testing of intelligent machines. One of those papers is the "Turing Test." The "Turing Test" consisted of a person asking questions to another person and to a machine. The questions were asked by keyboard. The theory of the paper states that if the machines answers cannot be distinguished from those of the humans, then the machine was intelligent to an extent. .
Turing's life long goal to was to create a machine following the blueprints of the human brain. Turing was often ridiculed for his theories and was believed by the public to be a disgrace to science. The public believed this way mostly because he was an atheist and a homosexual. The public would not listen to him because they feared the idea of a machine being smarter than a human. Turing's life came to a sad end in June of 1954 when he committed suicide by ingesting potassium cyanide. "When he died, Turing left the world a permanent legacy. Computers have revolutionized so many aspects of our world that today it is hard to imagine life without them" (Alan Turing n.p.).
Throughout history, there have been problems and situations that a human mind could not solve. These problems were possible to solve, but by conventional methods they would take years. An example of these types of problems is deciphering encrypted messages. Encryption is the process of scrambling a message to where unwanted eyes could not view it. Decryption is the process of unscrambling the encrypted messages. A solution of for these problems was in dire need when the US declared war on Germany.
The Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS) began deciphering German radio communications very early in the war. These German communications were encoded by the German Enigma system. "By early 1942, about 39,000 intercepted messages were being decoded each month, thanks to electromechanical machines known as "bombes".