Racy short story by Alan Turing offers glimpse of ‘playful, funny, cheeky’ side

A short story by Alan Turing, written the year after his 1952 arrest for gross indecency, offers a strikingly different portrait of the computing pioneer. Cambridge professor Sarah Dillon has transcribed and studied the piece, and argues Turing was playful, funny, cheeky, and literary—far from the isolated, humorless mathematician he's often remembered as. The story, which Dillon describes as racy, also reflects a candid interest in sexuality that complicates the usual accounts of his life.

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