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60 free Alan Turing trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Alan Turing invented the abstract machine that all computers still resemble, led the hut that broke the German naval Enigma, sketched the first detailed design for a stored-program computer, proposed the test that still frames every argument about artificial intelligence, and then wrote a paper on how leopards get their spots. He was prosecuted for his sexuality in 1952 and dead by 41. This quiz covers all of it. Easy questions ask where he worked in the war, what the Enigma was and which film starred Benedict Cumberbatch as him. Harder ones want the name of the statistical method he invented in Hut 8, the machine he built with Donald Bayley at Hanslope Park, the letter that made Churchill write "Action This Day", the silver he buried and never found, the chess program he ran by hand, the college that gave him a fellowship at 22 and the year his face appeared on the £50 note. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Turing, The Imitation Game and the Turing Award, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Built for computer science teachers, history buffs and quiz hosts. Related quizzes: World War 2, Computers and Famous Scientists.
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Q 01What was the codename for intelligence produced at Bletchley Park?
Ultra
The centre was the wartime home of the Government Code and Cypher School, and Turing reported there the day after war was declared.
Q 02Which section of Bletchley Park, responsible for German naval cryptanalysis, did Turing lead?
Hut 8
He picked the naval problem, he said, "because no one else was doing anything about it and I could have it to myself".
Q 03What electromechanical codebreaking machine did Turing specify soon after reaching Bletchley?
The bombe
Its name came from the Polish bomba kryptologiczna it improved on; the first one was installed on 18 March 1940.
Q 04Which mathematician's enhancement made the bombe a primary Bletchley tool against Enigma?
Gordon Welchman
The diagonal board he added let the machine rule out far more rotor settings per run.
Q 05On what date did Turing report to Bletchley Park, the day after Britain declared war on Germany?
4 September 1939
Like everyone there he signed the Official Secrets Act, which kept his war work secret for decades.
Q 06What statistical procedure did Turing devise to make more efficient use of the bombes against naval Enigma?
Banburismus
He conceived it the same night in December 1939 that he solved the naval indicator system, and invented a unit of evidence called the ban.
Q 07Turingery, devised in 1942, was a method for attacking which German cipher machine, codenamed Tunny?
The Lorenz SZ 40/42
It worked out the cam settings of the machine's wheels; Turing was not, despite the myth, involved in building Colossus.
Q 08Turing's late-war portable voice scrambler, built at Hanslope Park, had what codename?
Delilah
He demonstrated it by encrypting and decrypting a recording of a Churchill speech, but it was finished too late to be used.
Q 09What was Turing's nickname among his Bletchley Park colleagues?
Prof
His treatise on Enigma was accordingly known as the "Prof's Book".
Q 10Why did Turing cycle to work at Bletchley in a service gas mask each June?
Hay fever
He also chained his mug to the radiator pipes to stop it being stolen.
Q 11To whom did Turing and three colleagues write in October 1941 asking for more staff and bombes?
Winston Churchill
The reply to General Ismay was headed "ACTION THIS DAY", and the rough ways "began miraculously to be made smooth".
Q 12Roughly how many bombes were in operation by the end of the war?
More than 200
The Americans planned to build 336 of their own, one per wheel order, an idea Turing privately found faintly absurd.
Q 13By how much did Harry Hinsley estimate Bletchley shortened the war in Europe?
More than two years
He added that this did not account for the atomic bomb and other eventualities.
Q 21In which part of London was Turing born on 23 June 1912?
Maida Vale
A blue plaque marks the nursing home, which later became the Colonnade Hotel.
Q 22Turing's father was on leave from which employer when Alan was born?
The Indian Civil Service
His parents shuttled between India and Hastings, leaving the two boys with a retired Army couple.
Q 23Whose 1939 Cambridge lectures on the foundations of maths did Turing attend and argue with?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Turing defended formalism while the lecturer insisted mathematics invents its truths rather than discovering them.
Q 14Which honour did King George VI give Turing in 1946 for wartime services that remained secret for years?
OBE
A memo after the war reminded everyone at Bletchley that the code of silence would continue indefinitely.
Q 15What is the title of Turing's 1936 paper that introduced the machines now named after him?
On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem
It has been called "easily the most influential math paper in history" and proved the halting problem undecidable.
Q 16Which German mathematician originally posed the Entscheidungsproblem, or decision problem, in 1928?
David Hilbert
Turing showed no algorithm could solve it, publishing shortly after Alonzo Church reached the same conclusion via the lambda calculus.
Q 17Under which logician did Turing study at Princeton, where he earned his PhD in 1938?
Alonzo Church
His dissertation, Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals, introduced the idea of machines with "oracles".
Q 18Which Cambridge college elected Turing a Fellow at 22 for his central limit theorem dissertation?
King's
Unknown to him, Jarl Waldemar Lindeberg had already proved the same version of the theorem in 1922.
Q 19Which independent boarding school in Dorset did Turing attend from the age of 13?
Sherborne
On his first day, during the 1926 General Strike, he cycled 60 miles from Southampton unaccompanied to get there.
Q 20Who was the school friend described as Turing's first love, whose death in 1930 devastated him?
Christopher Morcom
He died of bovine tuberculosis weeks after they had sat scholarship exams together at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Q 24What stored-program computer did Turing design at the National Physical Laboratory in 1946?
The Automatic Computing Engine
The Pilot ACE ran its first program in May 1950, but the full version was not built in his lifetime.
Q 25Which university's Computing Machine Laboratory did Turing join in 1948?
Manchester
He wrote the first Programmer's Manual for the machine and consulted for Ferranti until his death.
Q 26In which 1950 paper did Turing propose the experiment now known as the Turing test?
Computing Machinery and Intelligence
A reversed form of the idea is used every day online: the CAPTCHA, which checks whether a user is human.
Q 27What was the chess program Turing wrote with Champernowne called?
Turochamp
Unable to run it on the Ferranti Mark 1, he executed it by hand from the pages of the algorithm, about half an hour per move.
Q 28Which colleague beat Turing's hand-run chess program in its recorded game?
Alick Glennie
It is said the program did win a game against Champernowne's wife, Isabel; Garry Kasparov called it "a recognizable game of chess".
Q 29What mechanism did Turing's 1952 'The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis' propose to explain patterns in living things?
A reaction–diffusion system
It predicted oscillating chemical reactions like the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, first observed in the 1960s, and helps explain spots on cats.
Q 30What did a 2023 experiment grow to confirm Turing's pattern hypothesis in vegetation?
Chia seeds
Researchers adjusted the moisture in even layers of seed and watched natural-looking patterns emerge.