Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges London: Burnett Books Ltd, 2000 Andrew Hodges brings Alan Turing to life in the namesake title, Alan Turing: The Enigma. Alan Turing, a war hero in his own right, worked during World War II at Bletchley Park in England which was the site housing British codebreakers for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS). One of his main objectives was to crack the German Enigma machine’s code. Turing’s work was crucial to the war, and beyond that, he is known as the father of computer science and a brilliant mathematician. Turing became alarmed about the war with Germany in the fall of 1937. At the time, Turing spent his time studying and working on a thesis based on the theory of computation and on the hypothetical devices later known as Turing machines. A Turing machine in today’s sense would be a model for a modern computer. Besides the important work with his research, he found time to enjoyably take up the subject of cryptanalysis assuming words would be replaced by numbers eventually to be transmitted on a binary scale: in zeros and ones, on and off, true and false. Turing himself even spent the time building hardware to produce ciphering machines as a hobby while at Princeton. These precursors were a perfect setup for the work he would pursue with the GC&CS and Turing a natural recruit. During the First World War and up to this time in 1938, the GC&CS grew from a small operation of around 25 officers with a small clerical staff
Along with Carr using the extrinsic truth, he also made sure to include the intrinsic aspect to each example. The digital computer spoken of in the section wasn’t invented at the time, therefore Turing was only but assuming. Carr said in his article that Alan Turing proved the functions of the computer, but gives no details into how he proved it.
5 remarkable British scientists had gotten their hands on an actual Enigma machine smuggled out of Berlin. They had put tremendous effort into decoding the Nazi's messages by using their cryptanalytic abilities but had failed because of the lack of information on the machine's
One of the most important needs for espionage was in the deciphering of the ENIGMA. [176] This was used to code and decode German messages sent and received between commanders and such. [176] It was very hard to decipher the ENIGMA because of the way it was set up. [176] What made it so difficult to decipher was the process by which a letter in an original message was transformed into a different one for the transmitted message. [176] The process involved, among other things, three motors in each machine that were chosen from a set of five. [176] Each of them had twenty-six settings, and a plugboard, which connected the keyboard letters to the lampboard letters. [176] For example the first time the L key was pressed a B might light up, but because the rotors turned further entries of L on the board would not produce another B but rather other letters. [176] US intelligence along with help from other countries was eventually able to make a duplicate machine that would help them in decoding messages. [177] Without help from espionage in this instance the US and their allies would be susceptible to unknown attacks and movements of armies without having a chance to
The work of the British codebreakers at Bletchley Park in deciphering the German Enigma code was vital in giving the Allied navies the edge in the Battle of the Atlantic. In February 1942, however, the German code was improved, resulting in ‘the Drumbeat crisis’ when shipping losses were their greatest – until March 1943, when the German code was again broken.
“In March 1952, Turing was charged with indecency for acknowledging a homosexual relationship, which was illegal in Britain at that time.” Turing pleaded guilty and was convicted of a choice of probation on the condition that he underwent one year of hormonal therapy to decrease his libido. Soon after, Turing died at the age of 41, on June 7th, 1954, in Wilmslow, Cheshire, England. “The cause of death was cyanide poisoning, according to the post-mortem examination. A half-eaten apple was found near his body (he had a fascination with the plot of the fairytale Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) and, because it had been suspected that his sudden death was not accidental, the coroner held an inquest which confirmed that he had committed suicide.”
While bloody fights were taken place, the communication war raged on in secrecy. Bletchley Park is where the fight mostly took place. In the late 1930’s in a remote area outside London, lived a mansion (Gladwin). This mansion was soon to be converted into a super-secret compound called Bletchley Park. The park was surrounded by small cottages in which students from the local colleges were recruited from to live there (Gladwin). Their task was to decipher all types of encoded messages in secrecy away from the public eye. Soon to be there was the infamous Alan Turing. Although it was mainly a code breaking facility, there was not a more daunting task to decode messages coming from the infamous German machine Enigma. Enigma was an encrypting type righter which used rotors which created nearly impossible trillion different results each time it sent out a message (Gladwin). It was nearly impossible to decipher by just using paper. Turing had an idea of creating a large machine in which could emulate nearly thirty six Enigmas at any time while running (Gladwin). The machine Turing had created was known as a bombe. Soon after they would use these bombes to crack the Enigma codes being sent from the Germans (Gladwin). Although Bletchley Park was one of the main places, in an interview with Jean Valentine, it was found that by the end of the war there was at least five other places where bombes were stationed at (Lewis). This machine was one of the first successful models of its kind. Also in the interview Jean states that, “These machines did the equivalent work of 36 Enigmas and 200 of them were working 24 hours a day…” (Lewis). Bombes were one of the most successful machines of its time for breaking the Enigma. Secrecy was also a key component in Bletchley Park. In the interview with Jean Valentine, it was found that if anyone asked them about what they were doing they were to tell others that
In 1936 Alan Turing, an English mathematical and a logician created the “Turing machine” (Copeland, 2000) which was originally created for the purpose a mathematical tool, it represented a computing device that contained a read/write head or a scanner with a paper tape passing through it. This machine could
In real life Alan and his team really did work full time at Bletchley Park intercepting and reading German encrypted code. There were 10,000 people that were a part of the Bletchley Park operation. In 1939 GC&CS (name of Cipher School) and Alan Turing created the Bombe to determine the German’s daily rotor settings. This is the most well known way of breaking code, but this was not the only way to break code during World War II. German’s had increasingly capable versions of Lorenz Cipher machine.
However, unlike Sully, Alan Turing did not become an instant national hero. Both protagonists are portrayed as sophisticated men; the main difference was that Sully was ‘just doing my job' and Turing likewise enjoyed solving puzzles and wanted to give enigma a try to see if he could break the ‘unbreakable code’. Turing rose against having to decode millions of different letter combinations, that could have been used by the Germans. Turing later had an idea that the Germans were instructed to have five random letters before each transmission, later compiling a list of predictable words. The actions of Turing saved more than fourteen million lives and shortened the war by about two years.
Alan Turing was a mathematical genius and inspirational visionary, famous today for his code-breaking work during World War II that saved the allies from the Nazis. His study of mathematical logic eventually led to the birth of the field of computer science. Although Alan Turing undeniably changed the world for the better during a time when the world was at great risk, his academic work was not purposely responding to concerns of the day. His inspiration was a
Cracking the Enigma was a huge accomplishment for the allies in WWII. A huge part of winning the war, laid in cracking the code. This meant that the allies could understand the secret messages the axis were sending, which again helped them tremendously.
Alan Turing’s work with the enigma changed the war, without Alan’s work on the enigma the war would have possibly continued for another two to three years, killing hundreds of more men. Alan created the first thinking machine, the Bombe, in secret helped end the war, he changed the direction of the war. Without Alan’s work on the enigma the lives lost in the war would have been in vain. Alan become the founding father of modern computing because of his work with the enigma, today we still use his ideas in our work.
The Imitation Game The film, “The Imitation Game”, follows the life of Alan Turing, a homosexual mathematician, who became a war hero after breaking Enigma, an encryption device that the Germans used for communication purposes during World War II. Decoding Enigma had a major effect on World War II. In 1939, Alan Turing, and four other code breakers, Joan Clarke, Hugh Alexander, John Cairncross, and Peter Hilton were employed by the British military as cryptographers to decipher the secret messages that the Germans were sending. Decoding it was an impossible task – there was 150,000,000,000,000 possible codes, which would be switched everyday by the Germans, forcing the five codebreakers to start over. Throughout the film, Turing works to design a machine that would be smarter than any human brain to decode Enigma instantly.
In WWII, a German cipher telegraph was used to send messages to others with nearly no possibility to encrypt. This incredible machine was called Enigma. Enigma's settings made about 158 quintillion solutions. However, the Allies were able to crack its code. When Poland was taken over by the Germans, the Polish and some French ciphers told the UK everything that they knew to help the cryptanalysts at Bletchley. From their Enigma was further cracked.
A code cracker (Herold Keen) was involved in the development of the “Bombe” machine. With a responsibility of the construction and manufacturing of the machine. It is of no doubt that the same amount of pressure was upon him as it was upon Mr Alan and Mr Welchman. Prior to the British’s attempt of building a decipherer was important development designed in 1938 in Poland by a code cracker who goes by the name of Marian Rejewski. It was named "cryptologic bomb" (Polish: bomba kryptologiczna) at the Biuro Szyfrów (Cipher