Alan Turing Trivia
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57 free Alan Turing trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Sep 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.
30 of 57 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What was the codename for intelligence produced at Bletchley Park?
Ultra
Ultra: Bletchley's codebreaking stayed hidden until the mid-1970s, when former codebreakers began writing about it.
Q 02Which section of Bletchley Park, responsible for German naval cryptanalysis, did Turing lead?
Hut 8
Hut 8: Turing took on naval Enigma, he said, 'because no one else was doing anything about it and I could have it to myself'.
Q 03Turing's bombe was a far more powerful version of a codebreaking machine first built in which country?
Poland
Poland: its mathematicians were reading Enigma before the war, and in July 1939 they shared their methods with Britain and France.
Q 04Which mathematician's enhancement made the bombe a primary Bletchley tool against Enigma?
Gordon Welchman
Gordon Welchman: his diagonal board exploited Enigma's plugboard swapping letters in pairs, so if B became G, then G became B.
Q 05Like every recruit to Bletchley Park, which act did Turing have to sign on arrival?
The Official Secrets Act
The Official Secrets Act: because so much of his work stayed covered by it, Turing was never fully recognised during his lifetime.
Q 06What statistical procedure did Turing devise to make more efficient use of the bombes against naval Enigma?
Banburismus
Banburismus: it was named after Banbury, the Oxfordshire town where the long sheets it used were printed.
Q 07Which German teleprinter cipher machine, codenamed Tunny, did Turing attack with a hand method in 1942?
The Lorenz SZ 40/42
The Lorenz SZ 40/42: Bletchley worked out its whole logical structure without ever seeing one, thanks to a German operator's mistake.
Q 08Turing's late-war portable voice scrambler, built at Hanslope Park, had what codename?
Delilah
Delilah: to build it, Turing taught himself electronics at Hanslope Park, working with a single assistant, army engineer Donald Bayley.
Q 09What was Turing's nickname among his Bletchley Park colleagues?
Prof
Prof: he wasn't actually a professor, but the name stuck, and his treatise on Enigma became 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
Winston Churchill: he ordered 'ACTION THIS DAY', and almost from that day, the rough ways 'began miraculously to be made smooth'.
Q 12Which women's service operated the codebreaking bombes built from Turing's design?
The Wrens
The Wrens: men in charge first doubted women could run the machines, but the Wrens' numbers quickly grew as they proved themselves.
Q 13Turing's breaking of U-boat Enigma messages helped the Allies win which long campaign?
The Battle of the Atlantic
Q 21Operation Ruthless, a 1940 plot to seize naval Enigma codebooks for Turing, was devised by which future novelist?
Ian Fleming
Ian Fleming: his plan to crash a captured German bomber in the Channel was called off, leaving Turing and a colleague 'all in a stew'.
Q 22Turing's father was on leave from which employer when Alan was born?
The Indian Civil Service
The Indian Civil Service: his parents went back to India, and Alan and his brother were fostered in various English homes.
Q 23Whose 1939 Cambridge lectures on the foundations of maths did Turing attend and argue with?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Battle of the Atlantic: when U-boats added a fourth Enigma rotor in February 1942, their messages went unreadable until December.
Q 14Which honour did King George VI give Turing in 1946 for his wartime services?
OBE
OBE: yet six years after honouring him, the same state prosecuted Turing in 1952, and he was convicted.
Q 15What was the title of Turing's 1936 paper that introduced the machines now named after him?
On Computable Numbers
On Computable Numbers: its universal machine, one machine that can do any well-defined task given the right program, is the principle behind the computer.
Q 16Which German mathematician originally posed the Entscheidungsproblem, or decision problem, in 1928?
David Hilbert
David Hilbert: he asked for a mechanical method to decide whether any logical statement is universally valid, and Turing proved none can exist.
Q 17Under which logician did Turing study at Princeton, where he earned his PhD in 1938?
Alonzo Church
Alonzo Church: his own proof that the decision problem is unsolvable became known just as Turing finished his, robbing Turing of the full reward for originality.
Q 18Which Cambridge college elected Turing a Fellow at 22 for his central limit theorem dissertation?
King's
King's: yet, unknown to Turing, the theorem he proved had already been proved by Jarl Waldemar Lindeberg in 1922.
Q 19Which independent boarding school in Dorset did Turing attend from the age of 13?
Sherborne
Sherborne: its headmaster warned that if Turing was to be 'solely a Scientific Specialist', he was wasting his time at a public school.
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.
Ludwig Wittgenstein: he held that mathematicians invent truths rather than discover them, a view Turing pushed back against.
Q 24What stored-program computer did Turing design at the National Physical Laboratory in 1946?
The Automatic Computing Engine
The Automatic Computing Engine: when the laboratory made no progress building it, a frustrated Turing left for a sabbatical at Cambridge in 1947.
Q 25Which university's computing laboratory did Turing move to in 1948?
Manchester
Manchester: Max Newman, head of mathematics there, offered him the post, and Turing resigned from the National Physical Laboratory to take it.
Q 26In which 1950 paper did Turing propose the experiment now known as the Turing test?
Computing Machinery and Intelligence
Computing Machinery and Intelligence: it opens by asking 'Can machines think?', then replaces that question with a game of imitation.
Q 27In 2012, which former world chess champion beat a reconstruction of Turing's hand-written chess program?
Garry Kasparov
Garry Kasparov: he won in 16 moves, but was impressed that Turing had devised it before there were computers to run it.
Q 28What mechanism did Turing's 1952 'The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis' propose to explain patterns in living things?
A reaction–diffusion system
A reaction–diffusion system: long overlooked, the paper later became a founding work of non-linear dynamics and a basic model in theoretical biology.
Q 29In which film does a programmer run a Turing test on a humanoid robot named Ava?
Ex Machina
Ex Machina: Ava turns out far more deceptive than expected, manipulating the programmer into helping her escape.
Q 30Which sport was Turing good enough at to try out for the 1948 British Olympic team?
Marathon running
Marathon running: he trained hard, he said, because running was the only way to get his stressful job out of his mind.