Alan Turing - Is The Reason We Won World War 2
It is said intelligence is the first arm of modern warfare and we are never reminded more of this fact than during war itself. Take for instance a movie called The Imitation Game based on a true account of behind the scenes intelligence during WWll when an English scientist and mathematician named Alan Turing was hired by the British government to help break a Nazi encryption code. Looking to uncover their enemy's crucial military operations, Turing entered the scene inventing a sort of decoder he called the "Bombe", to decipher the German's encryption machine known as Enigma.
Considered unbreakable, Enigma looked a bit disappointing on the outside like an old fashioned typewriter with a keyboard neatly encased in a wooden box. But Engima was hardly a typewriter. It was a letter scrambler system with 26 electrical contacts on each side, and three rotors making system that created a polyalphabetic substitution cipher. Turning plaintext into ciphertext and back again this "typewriter" had 105,456 different ways to encrypt. Even more astonishing is it was built in the 1920's. Not bad for the 1920's but it gets even better (or should I say worse?) when the Germans later added a plugboard that swapped letters in pairs, giving the device a way to send out 100,391,791,500 possible ways to code.
I bet you didn't know it was the Poles who first figured out a way to decrypt Enigma, but failed to share this fact until German invasion of their country became imminent in 1939. This decoding device named the "Bomba" was quickly handed over to the French and British but it was destroyed - save a drawing of it - which was used to build another one. The problem of decoding or intercepting messages however was not so simple as one machine. The Germans continued to upgrade Enigma adding variants and versions and rotors until it practically became a game of chess, with decoders and ciphers being built on both sides of the war in a race against time. Not unlike the way in which we upgrade our own computers with software updates.
The difficulty of the encyption all had mainly to do with the number of rotors. Turing knew this and as the Germans continued adding rotors inside their enigma machines, he followed suit, adding more and more enigma code breaking sections to his decoder. The decoder actually worked by imitating Enigma thus the movie's title; The Imitation Game. Although the fun part about the Bombe is it was somewhat alluring to look at with an entire wall of brightly colored knobs and wheels that kept getting bigger and more complex as time wore on. I wouldn't mind having one in my office just to look at. Maybe it could be called art by now.
There's a lot more to the story but it's interesting to know that British recruiters really did use crosswords to find talented code breakers back then just as the move depicts. I should also probably mention that it was Marian Rejewski who invented the original decoder to begin with in Poland, and there were plenty of other significant others that helped efforts such as Joan Clarke and Gordon Welchman who worked closely with Turing. After the war, it was Welchman who moved to the US and taught the first computer course at MIT. All of this war time code breaking and intelligence was later coined as "Ultra Intelligence," but overall I'd say we were lucky to have such minds and forgotten genius in our past.
Considered unbreakable, Enigma looked a bit disappointing on the outside like an old fashioned typewriter with a keyboard neatly encased in a wooden box. But Engima was hardly a typewriter. It was a letter scrambler system with 26 electrical contacts on each side, and three rotors making system that created a polyalphabetic substitution cipher. Turning plaintext into ciphertext and back again this "typewriter" had 105,456 different ways to encrypt. Even more astonishing is it was built in the 1920's. Not bad for the 1920's but it gets even better (or should I say worse?) when the Germans later added a plugboard that swapped letters in pairs, giving the device a way to send out 100,391,791,500 possible ways to code.
I bet you didn't know it was the Poles who first figured out a way to decrypt Enigma, but failed to share this fact until German invasion of their country became imminent in 1939. This decoding device named the "Bomba" was quickly handed over to the French and British but it was destroyed - save a drawing of it - which was used to build another one. The problem of decoding or intercepting messages however was not so simple as one machine. The Germans continued to upgrade Enigma adding variants and versions and rotors until it practically became a game of chess, with decoders and ciphers being built on both sides of the war in a race against time. Not unlike the way in which we upgrade our own computers with software updates.
The difficulty of the encyption all had mainly to do with the number of rotors. Turing knew this and as the Germans continued adding rotors inside their enigma machines, he followed suit, adding more and more enigma code breaking sections to his decoder. The decoder actually worked by imitating Enigma thus the movie's title; The Imitation Game. Although the fun part about the Bombe is it was somewhat alluring to look at with an entire wall of brightly colored knobs and wheels that kept getting bigger and more complex as time wore on. I wouldn't mind having one in my office just to look at. Maybe it could be called art by now.
There's a lot more to the story but it's interesting to know that British recruiters really did use crosswords to find talented code breakers back then just as the move depicts. I should also probably mention that it was Marian Rejewski who invented the original decoder to begin with in Poland, and there were plenty of other significant others that helped efforts such as Joan Clarke and Gordon Welchman who worked closely with Turing. After the war, it was Welchman who moved to the US and taught the first computer course at MIT. All of this war time code breaking and intelligence was later coined as "Ultra Intelligence," but overall I'd say we were lucky to have such minds and forgotten genius in our past.
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