You may have read this week on the front page that Edmund M. Clarke, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, won the Turing Award, described as the "Nobel Prize for computing."

Dr. Clarke, a former student of his and a French researcher shared the Turing Award for developing "model checking," a way to find errors in complex computer chips, systems and networks.

He was the fourth CMU faculty member to win the award, and 10 out of the 51 winners have been affiliated with the university as faculty members or students. TechMan is proud of his alma mater.

But another story, one of triumph and tragedy, lies beneath the surface -- the story of British mathematician Alan Mathison Turing.

Turing was a seminal figure in the fields of cryptanalysis, artificial intelligence and the development of the computer. He was a towering intellect, a war hero and a homosexual who was persecuted by his country.

In 1936 he published a paper outlining the concept of the Turing machine. While a theoretical rather than a physical machine, it was the first gleam of the idea of the modern computer program and a "stored program" computer.

When World War II broke out, Turing reported to Bletchley Park, the British government's wartime communications facility. His work there was critical in breaking military codes the Germans produced on Enigma machines.

He designed 1-ton behemoths called bombes, electromechanical devices that could discover the positions of rotors in the Enigma machines, thus allowing decoding of messages.

Some say that the breaking of the Enigma codes was a major reason for Germany's ultimate defeat, because it allowed the Allies to know military movements in advance, including the positions of U-boats.

After the war, Turing joined the National Physical Laboratory, where he worked on the design of the Automatic Computing Engine. He presented a paper in 1946 that was the first complete design of a stored-program computer in Britain.

Later at the University of Manchester, he wrote the software for one of the earliest true computers -- the Manchester Mark I.

But perhaps the context in which most people have heard Turing's name is the "Turing Test."

Turing devised it as a way to test a machine's ability to demonstrate intelligence.

The test is simple. A judge has a conversation over a teletype with a human and a machine, both of which he cannot see. If the judge cannot tell reliably which is which, the machine passes the test. The idea kicked off the study of artificial intelligence.

In 1945, the British government awarded Turing the Order of the British Empire for his work at Bletchley Park.

In 1952, that same government arrested Alan Turing. He had reported a break-in at his house by a 19-year-old male acquaintance. During the investigation, he admitted the two had a sexual relationship.

Turing was convicted of gross indecency. He was unrepentant and was given the choice of prison or probation with the condition that he undergo chemical castration. To avoid jail, he underwent a year of injections of female hormones, suffering side effects such as breast enlargement.

His security clearance was revoked and he was no longer allowed to do government work on his beloved codebreaking.

On June 8, 1954, Turing's housekeeper found him dead, a half-eaten apple laced with cyanide by his bedside. His death at age 41 was ruled a suicide.

The Association for Computing Machinery established the Turing Award in 1966 to honor a man whose genius influenced the outcome of a war and the fabric of modern life.