Alan Turing: The Day Before You Came

In his famous article in 1950 Alan Turning proclaimed: "I believe that by the end of the century ... one will be able to speak of machines thinkingwithout expecting to be contradicted." Clearly the famous Turing got it wrong (Tom Melzer, G2, 18 June). And even if the Turing test had been passed, he would still have been wrong. The Turing test is the crudest of behavourism. In my lifetime Turing has gone from obscurity to awe-inspring icon, but this seems to be exaggerated. He certainly did good work on the notion of computability, though that was based on something much more fundamental called Godel's theorem. It doesn't seem to be true that he was the inventor of the computer, though again he did good work on early versions of programming computers. I can't comment on his contribution to breaking the German codes, since none of the accounts I've seen explain exactly how they did it. But I understand that it took them a long time, and that when they'd done it, Doenitz became suspicious and changed all the codes. It is perhaps time for a more balanced view of Turing. 
Roger Schafir
London

Letter to The Guardian. 
Interesting, though I'm way too dumb to verify most of this.
One might also contest Alan Turing's elevation to the status of great gay martyr; he died more than a year after he'd stopped the hormone treatment, we do not know for certain if he took his own life (he left no suicide note, and there is evidence he may have been poisoned by a "nutty professor" home experiment), and he appeared to be quite happy being gay - indeed, it was his shamelessness which meant he shopped himself to the police.
Whatever, I shall happily be joining in the celebrations of Alan Turing's 100th birthday tomorrow.

Update Saturday 23rd: 'Alan Turing: Inquest's Suicide Verdict 'Not Supportable'. BBC News. Told ya!
One of many impressive, wide-ranging and accessible articles about Alan Turing for the centenary on the BBC website. Kudos to them.
There's a more boffiny collection of articles on the science bits at Wired.com.
Polari Magazine online have also published several articles - much of it interesting and thoughtful, but they do tend to obsess on getting an official pardon and some kind of memorial (The fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square! A bank note!).
I doubt that Turing would have been bothered about such things.

Update 2: Turing Committed Suicide: Case Closed Very good breakdown by the producers of Codebreaker.