Alan Turing “Alan Turing (1912-54) was a British mathematician who made history. His breaking of the German U-boat Enigma cipher in World War II ensured Allied-American control of the Atlantic.” Alan Turing has made a great impact on the development of theoretical computer science, provided a formalization of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer. He is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. His major accomplishments are listed as following: During the World War II, Alan Turing led the works of the British World War II codebreaking station which name is the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, which was tasked with solving German naval (Kriegsmarine) Enigma messages. By producing the modified Bombe which was a device previously found by Polish scientists that known as 'Bomba', Alan took their early versions and developed it into an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine, which greatly helped in the breaking of the Enigma code used by the German forces, and finally …show more content…
By inventing the Turing Machine, a hypothetical machine which manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules, in 1935, he is widely considered as the father of Artificial Intelligence. He believed that computers would be able to learn and devised the Turing Test, which would text whether a computer was really intelligent. To this day, no computer has passed the test, as yet, and all stored-programme digital computers are modelled on this
Turing, a physicalist, believed that artificial intelligence could be achieved in the future. Turing argued that the mind was merely due to the physical aspects of the brain and so a machine could one day be created that has a mind of its own, i.e. artificial intelligence. He created a test called the Turing Test to determine whether a machine has artificial intelligence. In the Turing Test, an interrogator asks two subjects a series of questions. One of the subjects is a person, the other is the computer. The goal is for the person to imitate a computer and the computer to imitate the person. If the interrogator is fooled into thinking that the computer is the human then the computer, according to Turing, is concluded to have the ability to think and thus, have a mind. Turing argued that machines passing the Turing Test were sufficient for ascribing thought.
What is Enigma? It is a mysterious thing that is hard to understand, even if possible. During World War II, Alan Turing took on the mission to break the code that so many people in Britain thought was impossible. Even though Alan Turing’s childhood was full of misery, he was able to break a seemingly unbreakable code, and became a war hero by saving countless of lives during World War II.
Although the effect of Turing’s contribution cannot be quantifiable in the Battle of the Atlantic or even the war in general, it is agreeable that with Ultra, the Allies had an upper hand in winning the war. The Allies essentially knew what the Germans were thinking, their ways, actions, and habits. This provided tremendous amounts of information for the Allies, which then benefited their strategies of approaching the
“the keyboard for inputting letters, the scrambler unit for encrypting the letters and the lamp board for displaying the enciphered letters” (Lendl). In order to break the Enigma Machine, the code breakers had to find the daily settings that the German used and understand them. However, it is important to know that Polish cryptographers already broke the Enigma machine in 1932 as Marian Rejewski reconstructed a replica of the Enigma i.e. Bomba machine. However, Turing used Rejewski’s ideas and improved the bombe machine so that the machine could go through all the possible combinations of the Enigma rapidly (Lendl). The polish Bomba inspired Alan Turing for the construction of his own Bombe machine. The Bombe machine was crucial for the breaking of Enigma’s signals. This machine is not considered as a computer and does not perform calculation, but was designed “to carry out a systematic search to determine the following components of an Enigma key: the rotor order, the ‘rotor core starting positions’, and some of the ‘steckers’” (Carter). Due to the work of the Bletchley Park codebreakers, the United Kingdom had access to the German communications and could predict future naval attacks, this allowed the prevention of several
After receiving his doctorate in 1938, Alan Turing returned to Cambridge, England and took a part-time position at a British code-breaking organization known as the “Government Code and Cypher School”. Whenever the Second World War broke out, Alan Turing was one of the leading participants in code-breaking against the axis powers (Turing would try to break the code of German ciphers in particular). During his time at Bletchley Park, the Government Code and Cypher School wartime station, Alan Turing broke the German’s Enigma Machine”, a machine that would transmit secret Nazi information that only the Germans could read. In addition to this, Alan Turing would go on to make an experiment called a “Turing Test” that was made to see whether or not machinery developed artificial
Alan Turing and his code-breakers broke the German Enigma code with the originally designed machine, Christopher, and the results proved vital. “Historians estimate that breaking Enigma shortened the war by more than two years, saving over 14 million lives” (Imdb). A nasty war that showed the true nature of humanity to be violent and sickening, provided insight in to how a genius mathematician in Turing, was shown the same violent and sickening treatment because of his sexuality. Alan Turing committed suicide in 1954 after taking a bite of an apple dusted with cyanide. The Imitation Game unravels the story of a man who is forever owed by the world for his bravery and ingenious tactics to breaking what was deemed the impossible code of
Leonardo Da Vinci was an amazing engineer during his lifetime. He made all types of designs for various types of prototypes that would later come in play years after his death. He designed
The Enigma is a tool used by the Soviets and Germany during World War II to send coded messages that were supposed to be impossible to break. Due to Alan Turing’s genius idea of creating a machine to cycle through the millions of settings on the Enigma; sped up by already known phrases and words helped break the codes saving over an estimated fourteen million lives, and ending the war possibly two years earlier. Alan Turing is considered to be a hero for his war efforts and for the many lives he saved. Alan Turing was not treated like a war hero though. Suspicious cops followed Turing where he was seen handing an envelope to a male prostitute.
Cambridge University professor Alan Turing are presented. The first is the span of WWII, at the beginning of which he, an expert of puzzle solving, is hired by the British government to work on a team, whose secret project is to break what is largely seen as the unbreakable secret code behind the Nazis' communications machine, named Enigma, which if they can would give the Allies an advantage and possibly even end the war. The problem is that Enigma is recoded every day, so that even if the team can decipher a coded message transmitted by the Nazis, that code would be obsolete by the next day. There are 159,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible codes that could be input into Enigma. A largely arrogant, antisocial, solitary and literal minded man, Alan is the bane of the team's existence, especially that of his superior, Commander Denniston, and Hugh Alexander, who is hired as the team's initial leader.
Alan Turing was a renowned modern mathematician and cryptologist who became known as the father of computer science and eventually became a gay rights icon for his persecution due to his homosexuality. He was also extremely important in winning the second world war, developing the world’s first computer to combat and break the German message encrypting Enigma machine. In fact, Winston Churchill, one of the most prominent figures of World War II, let alone the 20th century, said that Turing made the single biggest contribution to Allied victory in the war against Nazi Germany and its Axis partners. Without Alan Turing, the Allies wouldn’t be able to know the Nazi plans and could very likely have lost the war. Turing, too, developed the idea of
Alan Mathison Turing was an English mathematician and computer scientist, famous for cracking the code the Nazi machine “Enigma” had used. This code was considered by many to have been undecipherable.
It was not until the war broke out that he comes on full- time at Bletchley Park. Bletchley Park was a top secret place of worked used to break German codes. Here he was fixated of breaking the enigma code. The code was broken already once, so the cypher’s code was being changed daily. By the time that one message was deciphered, the code to figure out the next would have been changed. Therefore, Turing set out to create the enigma machine.
Even though the Enigma was difficult to hack, Alan Turing made use of its flaws in the creation of the Bombe. The Enigma appeared perfect in use of encrypted messages but it used keys within the machine that were considered weak. Knowing that this vulnerability is present, the Bombe was able to decrypt the message with a method known as brute force. Brute forcing allowed the Bombe to “try out all the possibilities one after another” (Hodges, 1983). Through the long exploration of all the different possibilities, a code would be broken. Although brute force was just an aspect of what made the Bombe great, it still played a major role in the use of the Bombe. With the creation of the Bombe, Alan Turing was able to hack the Enigma through a tool that he created in order help others. Although this hack was considered good, other people would begin to hack for more malicious
Hugh Alexander as the leader of the team decide to work on the code everyday with the rest of the team using only their limited knowledge, while Turing believes that the only way to crack the Enigma code is to learn Enigma it self, he works alone by himself to developing a machine that can be equal to Enigma or even more intelegent than Enigma. This machine could break every code that comes out from Enigma. The only problem is that Alan Turing doesn’t have all of the reasources that he needed to build the machine. The Commander in charge Denniston was denied to funding to build Turing’s machine. Alan only needs 100,000 pounds to build the machine. But once again Denniston refused to fund it. So Alan wrote a letters to the to Winston Churchill as the highest
In 1936 one the first concept of a computer was developed by Alan Turing, the Universal Turing Machine(UTM). Before Turing, there were only theories about computing machines that could do simple calculations but there were not any functioning models. However