Turing, as Welchman revealed, had played a key part in developing the attack on the Enigma, helping, among other things, to develop the “Bombe,” a mechanical device used to determine the daily settings of the machine. Welchman had reported to Bletchley at the outbreak of war, made key contributions to the cryptanalysis of the Enigma, and ultimately became the head of Hut 6 (Army and Luftwaffe cryptanalysis). Indeed, Welchman was regarded by the British authorities as being too informative, and lost his security clearance. This was followed in 1982 by Gordon Welchman’s most informative book, The Hut Six Story. ![]() In 1981 Rejewski wrote a paper describing the use the Poles had made of the mathematics of permutations to break Enigma messages. But it was only in the 1980s that the technical veil itself was first lifted. ![]() (“Jack”) Good, who served as Turing’s primary statistical assistant for a year. So some of Turing’s wartime colleagues began to discuss his vital role. ![]() Instead, mathematics and machines came to the forefront, and with them, the need for “men of the Professor type.” In the years leading up to the war, the major military powers had turned to sophisticated machine encryption of their messages, and these were largely impervious to the linguistic methods of attack used successfully in earlier periods. This was a significant omission, because signals intelligence in the 1939–1945 war was a very different affair than it had been earlier. But these early books focused almost entirely on the use of the intelligence generated rather than the technical methods used to acquire it, nor did they say much about the new role played by the “boffins” (the technical and scientific experts). Hinsley’s multivolume British Intelligence in the Second World War (1979–1990). Frederick Winterbotham’s The Ultra Secret (1974) revealed the scope and success of the Allied wartime efforts followed several years later by F. Now that Bertrand had let that the secret was out, the English lifted their embargo on any discussion of “Ultra,” the codename for intelligence deriving from this source. In July of 1939, in a famous conference near Warsaw (no doubt sensing the impending outbreak of war), the Poles revealed all this to their French and English counterparts, describing their methods and providing replicas of the device itself. For the better part of a decade (from 1933 to 1939), thanks in part to information provided by a German spy working in the Cipher Bureau of the German Ministry of Defense and passed on by Bertrand, the Poles were able to read a substantial majority of the German Enigma messages, ultimately only defeated towards the end of the decade by a succession of German communications security upgrades. and Henryk Zygalski, to work on the decryption of the Enigma, a mechanical device for enciphering messages that the German military had begun using just a few years before. It emerged that in 1932 the Polish military had hired three mathematicians, Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki. The success of the initial English embargo on any mention of their remarkable wartime cryptanalytic successes may be judged by the total absence of any mention of them in David Kahn’s encyclopedic 1967 book The Code-breakers which in contrast devoted an entire chapter to the US exploitation of Japanese codes and ciphers.Īll this changed after the publication in 1973 of General Gustav Bertrand’s book Enigma. ![]() It was only decades later that the scope and importance of Turing’s work at Bletchley Park – breaking German codes and ciphers – first became known. No hint was ever given of the nature of his secret work, nor has it ever been revealed. At first even his whereabouts were kept secret, but later it was divulged that he was working at Bletchley Park, Bletchley. Immediately on the declaration of war he was taken on as a temporary Civil Servant in the Foreign Office, in the Department of Communications …. In her 1959 biography of her son, Sarah Turing devoted just a short chapter to the war, noting: After World War II, Turing then turned to the foundations of computer science, including his famous popular paper on whether a machine can think, which introduced the “Turing test,” the original imitation game.īut for the period of the war itself, almost nothing was known of Turing’s activities. In order to do this Turing introduced the concept of what is now termed a “Turing machine,” a mathematical abstraction of an algorithm. In the years immediately prior to World War II, Turing had solved Hilbert’s Entscheidungsproblem, that is, the “decision problem,” whether there exists a mechanical procedure for determining if a mathematical statement expressed in a formal language has a proof. In 1970, Alan Turing was best known for his work in two areas: mathematical logic and computer science. The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game.
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