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Summary Of Alan Turing The Enigma

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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

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