the only one allowed to sign couldn't mean it

Darling Sweetheart. You are my avid fellow feeling. My affection curiously clings to your passionate wish. My liking yearns for your heart. You are my wistful sympathy: my tender liking. Yours beautifully, M.U.C.

That letter appeared on the noticeboard of the Computer Department at Manchester University in the early 1950s, typed in capitals, and the people who read it there could not work out who in the building wrote like that. Nobody did. The author was the machine down the corridor, a Ferranti Mark 1, the production version of the Manchester machine, and M.U.C. stood for Manchester University Computer.

The program was Christopher Strachey's. He was thirty-five, a former Harrow schoolmaster with a lower second from Cambridge and no research post, and he had talked his way onto the Mark 1 the year before. On his first night with the machine he made it play God Save the King. Then he wrote a draughts program that could get through a whole game, the longest program anybody had written. Then he sat down with a copy of Roget's Thesaurus.

He went through it pulling words that sounded like longing. Adjectives: avid, wistful, tender, passionate. Nouns: fellow feeling, sympathy, liking, affection, desire. Verbs that cling and yearn. Adverbs for the sign-off. He built two sentence shapes. One was You are my (adjective) (noun). The other was My (adjective) (noun) (adverb) (verb) your (adjective) (noun), with the adjectives and the adverb each allowed to drop out. A letter was two opening words, five sentences of either shape, then Yours, an adverb, and the signature. The machine chose every word by drawing a number, and the routine that drew the numbers had been written for the same machine by Alan Turing.

It produced a letter a minute. Strachey later wrote in Encounter that very little thought had gone into devising it, and that the whole effect came from a rather simple trick. He pinned the results up anyway. Honey Dear, another began, and ran its five sentences down to Yours wistfully, M.U.C. His colleagues stood in front of the board, puzzled and then amused, and by the account the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester gives, they were floored when he told them what had written it. David Link, who rebuilt the program decades later, dates the letters on that board from August 1953 to May 1954. Andrew Hodges, Turing's biographer, puts the program in the summer of 1952. The original code is lost. Link calls the letters the earliest text a computer ever generated, thirteen years before ELIZA.

Strachey and Turing had known each other since the mid-1930s at King's College, Cambridge, where Turing was a graduate student and Strachey an undergraduate who had a breakdown in his second year, possibly, his Wikipedia entry says, from coming to terms with being gay. When Strachey turned up in Manchester, Turing set him a problem to keep him busy, a program that would make the machine simulate itself, and told a colleague it would. Strachey wrote to Turing after his 1951 BBC talk on whether computers could think to say the talk matched his own ideas closely. Both men were gay. There is no evidence of anything between them, and nothing says the letters were for anyone.

In December 1951 Turing met Arnold Murray, nineteen and out of work, outside the Regal Cinema on Oxford Road and took him to lunch. On 23 January 1952 Turing's house in Wilmslow was burgled, Murray said he knew who had done it, and Turing reported the crime. Somewhere in the police interview he told them about Murray. Both men were charged with gross indecency under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885. On 31 March 1952, on the advice of his brother and his solicitor, Turing pleaded guilty. Murray got a conditional discharge. Turing got twelve months' probation, on condition that he submit to what the court called organotherapy: a year of synthetic oestrogen at the Manchester Royal Infirmary, by injection, meant to switch off the thing he had been convicted of. It made him impotent and grew his breasts. It did not do the other thing. He lost his security clearance and kept his job, and he was still walking into the same building, past the same noticeboard, when a computer began publishing its affections on it.

That is the whole of the story, and it is already an odd one: the first text a machine ever wrote was a love letter, assembled from a thesaurus with random numbers from a routine Turing wrote. The part that stays is smaller. In that lab, in those years, there was exactly one correspondent who could put a declaration of love on a public wall under its own name, and it was the one that could not mean a word of it. Everyone understood that, which is why the letters were funny. The machine could say My affection curiously clings to your passionate wish and sign it, because the machine had no affection and no wish, and nobody was going to send the Manchester University Computer to the Infirmary. The two men who gave it the words had those things, and the law had an opinion about them, and so they stayed behind the signature.

everything's a sign / signed & sealed with a kiss

Strachey said there was very little doubt of the intention of the letters. He was talking about their tone, the way a sentence like You are my wistful sympathy can only be aiming at one thing. He did not say whose intention, and he was not asked, because a joke on a noticeboard is not a confession and a machine's name at the bottom makes sure of it. The letters went up for the better part of a year, one a minute when anyone wanted them, each one ending the same way, yours and an adverb and the machine's initials.

The last of them came down in May 1954. Turing died on 7 June.

The painting: Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Love Letter (early 1770s), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain. The Met reads the name on her letter with question marks; its best guess is "to monsieur my cavalier."

Sources