Alan Turing Alan Turing was an English mathematician . During World War II , he was a code - breaker with whom both Rachel Jensen and Toshiko Sato ' s grandparents worked . ( PROSE : " Who Killed Kennedy " , TV : " Greeks Bearing Gifts " ) During the war , he designed a Rift Predictor for Torchwood Three in 1941 ( PROSE : " The Twilight Streets " ) and cracked the code at Bletchley Park in spring of that year . ( AUDIO : " Criss - Cross " ) Although strictly confidential , WREN Constance Clarke was present that morning and knew the work was instrumental to the war effort , changing the tide of the war . ( AUDIO : " Criss - Cross " ) The Second Doctor remembered meeting Alan and observing how glowing parts in his huge computers attracted insects , which resulted in the term " bug " being born . ( AUDIO : " The Uncertainty Principle " ) He helped the Eighth Doctor crack an alien code in 1944 . ( PROSE : " The Turing Test " ) In the 1950s , he was arrested for being gay , and was injected with hormones . ( COMIC : " The Phantom Piper " ) He committed suicide in the mid - 1950s , after having been hounded out of academia by Professor Jeffrey Broderick . ( AUDIO : " Artificial Intelligence " ) Duplicates and alternatives . In 1954 , when Alan was nearing his end , Chiyoko copied Alan ' s mind and put it in a robotic Galatean body . ( COMIC : " The Phantom Piper " ) The Eleventh Doctor and Amy Pond met Alan ' s duplicate in the Museum of Lost Opportunities . Although appearing to possess many of Alan ' s memories and attitudes , the robot did not remember Alan ' s previous encounter with the Doctor . ( COMIC : " The Child of Time " ) By the time the Twelfth Doctor and Bill Potts came to visit Alan ' s duplicate at the lunar colony Athenia to translate a mysterious code scratched on the TARDIS ' doors , conflict had arisen between the Galateans and humans , while two years earlier , Alan had broke off his engagement with Ranesh , and hid himself away in a replica of King ' s College , Cambridge he had created on the Moon with Block Transfer Computation to work in quiet as he did not wish for the Galateans to see him as some kind of messiah . He gave his whereabouts to Chiyoko but only for emergencies . The code was part of the Dreamspace - residing Phantom Piper , who tricked the Doctor into coming to Alan so that Alan ' s Block Transfer Computation could make the Piper take physical form . Alan defeated the Piper and prevented the Piper ' s plot to start war between humans and Galateans by tricking him into shooting a construct of Alan which Alan created with Block Transfer Computation . This allowed Alan to break down the code of the Piper ' s construct using the bullet , which was part of the Piper . The Doctor told Alan that the fact that Alan ' s mind was able to make Block Transfer Computations while computers could not meant that Alan ' s mind was " as real as anyone ' s " . Afterwards , Alan asked Ranesh to marry him , which Ranesh accepted . ( COMIC : " The Phantom Piper " ) In an alternative timeline , Turing was the inventor of the Turing Shroud , which served as a schematic of an early computer , only to be arrested on charges of sexual deviancy by the Star Chamber in 1936 before he could do any serious work . He was kept locked up in the Tower of London until 2003 when he was executed by this timeline ' s version of Sabbath , who had been manipulated into believing that Turing ' s death would separate his world from the rest of the universe as alternate timelines began to collapse , but Turing ' s death actually accelerated the damage and destroyed this reality due to his status as the main focal point of this word ' s divergence from other histories . ( PROSE : " The Domino Effect " )