Cambridge University English literature professor Sarah Dillon has transcribed and studied an unpublished six-page short story by Alan Turing titled Pryce’s Buoy, probably written in late 1952 or early 1953, the year after his Manchester arrest for gross indecency. The incomplete tale, held in the King’s College, Cambridge, archives, follows Ron Miller, a working-class sex worker, and Alec Pryce, a scientist whose early invention is nicknamed Pryce’s buoy. Dillon reads Alec as autofictional, with the narrator switching between Alec’s inner monologue and Ron’s, and she quotes racy lines such as Ron possibly earning “five bob” under the arches and a “half-hearted smile” that is nonetheless enough. Dillon says the story challenges the popular image of Turing as an isolated, humourless genius, arguing he was “playful, funny, cheeky, literary, and someone who really liked sex.” The article situates the find against Turing’s public biography: his Bletchley Park codebreaking, postwar computing work at Manchester, his 1952 conviction and chemical castration, and his 1954 death which a coroner recorded as suicide. Dillon hopes the transcription will help reset the narrative around Turing by showing a literary and socially engaged side previously sidelined in cultural portrayals such as the film The Imitation Game.
![There is likely no true starting point for the rise of cognitive psychology but I will begin the story of that rise with mathematician Alan Turing (YEARS). Turing, considered by many as the father of computer science, was instrumental in helping the Allies crack the German ciphers used by their Enigma Machine. He published, in his short life*[1], some of the most important works for the development of modern digital computers. Of special note was the abstract model of any universal computing device called a Turing Machine, which denotes the functions necessary to operate on any valid, computable sequence. That’s a lot of words to basically say that Turing described how any computing device can be created to process data. Such devices are so universal that people have developed Turing Machines in Minecraft (CITE), in PowerPoint (CITE), and the video game Doom, using the monster movements on the maps as digital switches (CITE). Even the card game Magic the Gathering can be shown to operate as a Turing machine (CITE).

[1] Turing was weeks away from his 42nd birthday when he died of cyanide poisoning. The poisoning was self-inflicted, though some have suggested it was unintentional. He had suffered greatly at the hands of the British government, who offered him either prison or chemical castration for the crime of being gay. He chose the chemical castration and died less than two years later. Queen Elizabeth II pronounced Turing posthumously pardoned in 2014, 60 years after his death.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vtmyczjgwejqvjtufxzfdcpn/bafkreihz74g5aag5fo2m5uhc4kcq2ycphvmrkpam6hfytm65r3xtxbw62u)
