On a Sunday in June 1949, two British scientists, Max Newman and Alan Turing, dreamed aloud in the garden of a small house on the outskirts of Manchester. "It will learn how to play chess probably in the autumn," predicted the former. But then "what will happen at that stage is that we shan't understand how it does it, we'll have lost track," said the second. At their side, the journalist Lyn Newman, Max's wife, knew they weren't talking about a child with a passion for chess, but about a machine, christened "Baby," one of the very first computers in history. The two men were working on its design and development. The closer they got to their goal, the more Lyn Newman worried, as told by Jonathan Swinton, author of Alan Turing's Manchester (2019). Could the two researchers be on the verge of inventing a thinking machine?

At the time, Max Newman was head of the Computing Machine Laboratory at Manchester University. Turing, his deputy, was a genius mathematician, now considered by the scientific community to be the main contributor to the idea of artificial intelligence (AI). His destiny, which long remained unknown, was also linked to a tragic episode: Turing committed suicide in 1954 two years after his conviction for homosexuality – under the charge of "gross indecency" – in the United Kingdom.

It wasn't until the 1970s, with the declassification of documents relating to his work with British intelligence during the Second World War, that the full extent of his character became apparent. Today, historians credit him with playing a decisive role in deciphering coded Nazi messages, particularly those exchanged between the Kriegsmarine during the Battle of the Atlantic. In 2013, he was posthumously pardoned by Queen Elizabeth II.

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