The Man Who Breaks The Code
Few individuals have the guts and willpower to do something that changes the course of history and this is how they prove their utmost power and energy to the entire world, One of them was “Alan Turing”, The man who love machines was a British scientist and a pioneer in computer science and Cryptography. He was an enigma in his own time.
Born in London in 1912, he studied at both Cambridge and Princeton universities. He contemplated arithmetic and cryptology at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey where he got his Ph.D. (1938). Turing came back to Cambridge at once it was ending up progressively evident that there would have been another war with Germany. The British Government swung to colleges, particularly Cambridge and Oxford for people with aptitudes that could be helpful in deciphering German codes and in this Era, He accepted a position at the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS), the British code-breaking organization.
WWII and Enigma Machine
Out of many achievements, One was his goal to crack the complex Enigma code used in German military communications, which were generally regarded as impossible to break. He prototype model of his anti-Enigma “bombe”, named simply Victory, Turing with his remarkable efforts cracked the system and decryption of German messages began in mid-1941. To maintain progress on code-breaking, Turing started using electronic technology to achieve maximum throughput for mechanical working. Turing was one of the vital assets to the Allies, which helps them in successfully decoding many German messages.
His bombes turned Bletchley Park toward a code-breaking plant. At that time, Turing’s machines were splitting a stunning aggregate of 84,000 Enigma messages each month.
The Universal Turing Machine
In 1936, Turing had invented a hypothetical computing device that came to be known as the “Universal Turing Machine”, which is said to be equivalent to a digital computer. The baseline architecture behind the machine consists of an input output relation that the machine computes. The input is given on the machine’s tape in binary form, and the output consists of the contents of the tape when the machine halts.
“A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.”
Turing’s Legacy is still alive
Turing was found dead in his room, the diagnostic shows that the reason of death was intake of Cyanide, Many historians write it as suicide because of the fact that he was homosexual and homosexuality was a disgrace at that time in Britain.
The Heritage of Alan Turing’s life and work did not completely become exposed until long after his passing. Turing’s part at Bletchley Park in breaking the Enigma code was kept mystery until the 1970s, and the full story was not known until the 1990s. It has been evaluated that the endeavors of Turing and his kindred code-breakers abbreviated the war by quite a while. What is sure is that they spared incalculable lives and decided the course and result of the contention.
In 2013, Queen Elizabeth II granted Turing a posthumous royal pardon, in honor of his remarkable achievements.
“I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted,” —
Alan Turing
