Computing with Quantum Cats by John Gribbin

government, with the award of an OBE—one step up from an MBE, but such an inadequate recognition of his true worththat when Max Newman was also offered an OBE he refused it in protest at Turing's “ludicrous” treatment. 16
    In October 1945, less than ten years after the publication of “On Computable Numbers,” Turing joined the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) at Teddington, in charge of a project to design and build an electronic “universal computing machine.” He was, in fact, head-hunted for the post by John Wormersley, the head of the mathematical research division at NPL, who had been an admirer of Turing's work since reading “On Computable Numbers.” The first fruit of this project was a report by Turing, produced before the end of the year, called “Proposed Electronic Calculator.” This contained the first full description of a practical stored-program computer—one in which the program is stored in the computer's memory, rather than being plugged in by hand. Each program, remember, can be a virtual machine in its own right, so a single computer can simulate other computers; when you open an app on a tablet or smartphone, you are actually opening a stored program that is itself equivalent to a computer. Turing's plan, as set out in this document, was more far-reaching than the work of his contemporaries in the United States (discussed in the next chapter ). He was interested in developing an adaptable machine that could, through its programming, carry out many different tasks; he suggested that one program could modify another; and he understood better than his contemporaries the use of what we now call subroutines. Unlike modern computers, Turing's machine did not have a central processing unit, but worked in a distributed way, with different parts working in parallel with one another; also, instead of the instructions in a program being followed oneafter another in order, the program (or the programmer!) was to specify which instruction to go to next at each step. All of this made his planned computer faster and more powerful than those planned by his contemporaries; but it would require very skilled programmers to operate it. Why did Turing follow this route? As he wrote to a friend: “I am more interested in the possibility of producing models of the brain than in the practical applications to computing.” 17
    The trouble was that, as usual, Turing was far ahead of everyone else, and wanted to build an artificial intelligence before anyone had built a really effective electronic calculator. The project, dubbed ACE (for Automatic Computing Engine), was too ambitious, and Turing's strengths did not lie in project management. He wanted Flowers to work with him, but because of the secrecy surrounding Flowers’ wartime work could not explain why his presence would be vital; Flowers stayed at Dollis Hill, collaborating with Turing at arm's length, but was soon ordered to concentrate on his proper job. Things stumbled along, with a great deal of testing but very little computer building, until September 1947, when Turing (whose father had died the previous month) left the project, initially for a year's sabbatical in Cambridge, then moving on to Manchester University. But he left a legacy of programs, a kind of software library, prepared in the expectation of the completion of the project; when ACE eventually was built, its immediate success was largely based on this legacy.
    While at King's, Turing developed his running to such an extent that he was planning to enter the trials for the Marathon squad in the 1948 Olympic Games; the plan fell through, according to John Turing, 18 when as a result of a bet“Alan dived into a lake in January, contracted fibrositis, and thereby put himself out of the Wembley Olympics.”
    A cut-down version of ACE, called the Ace Pilot Model, or Pilot Ace, was completed at the NPL after Turing left, and ran for the