Bletchley Park
On September 3, 1939, the United Kingdom, along with France, declared war against Germany, after Adolf Hitler started to invade Poland igniting the six year period of World War 2. On the next day, an English mathematician called Alan Turing, turned up at Bletchley Park, Britain's secret codebreaking centre which focused on German naval cryptanalysis, specifically in the deciphering of Nazi Germany's main military communication device - the Enigma. Alan Turing designed an electromechanical machine called the Bombe, a device that searched through all of Enigma's permutations, enabling the British to eventually read all German Naval Enigma traffic in secret. Known today as the father of modern computer science, and founder of artificial intelligence, Alan Turing's work and contribution at Bletchley park, statistically shortened World Ward 2 by as much as two years saving millions of lives, according to US president Dwight Eisenhower.
Cracking Enigma
Alan Turing devised a number of techniques for shortening the code breaking process of German ciphers, which enabled the Allies to intercept and defeat the Axis powers in many crucial engagements, especially at the Battle of the Atlantic. Alan Turing's machine, the Bombe, constantly searched for countless settings that the Germans could possibly use for an Enigma message, making a chain of logical deductions enabling the British to read Nazi communication in plain text. On October 28, 1941, Turing wrote to Winston Churchill to ask for more people and funding, so they can create more Bombes and channels to decrypt Enigma faster, to which Churchill immediately wrote to his Generals "ACTION THIS DAY". Alan Turing was born in Maida Vale, London, graduated at King's College Cambridge with a degree in Mathematics and earned his PhD from the Deparment of Mathematics at Princeton University.
The Founder of Artifical Intelligence
When Turing arrived at Bletchley Park, he decided to tackle the particularly difficult problem of the German naval Enigma device because not a single person was working on it due to it's complexity. Three months later on December of 1939, Turing solved the essential part of the naval indicator system, the most complex part of the Enigma decryption. Turing also travelled to the United States in 1942 to help the US Navy on naval Enigma analysis and Bombe construction in Washington, also assisting Bell Labs, now known as the phone company Nokia, with the development of secure speech encryption features in phones. Alan Turing is also famous for developing the Turing test, or what he casually called "The Imitation Game", a test that determined a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to that of a human, therefore being called the founder of artificial intelligence.
A Mathematical Genius
Very early in life, Turing showed signs of the genius that he was later going to display prominently, reportedly having an IQ of 185 despite having weaknesses in his English and French subjects. Despite Turing's exceptional intelligence in Science and Mathematics, back in the 1920s, schools placed more emphasis on classical studies, with Turing's parents being told by one of his headmasters, that him wanting to solely become a Scientific Specialist, is a waste of time in school. In his teenage years, it was noted that Turing was able to solve advanced Mathematical problems even without having studied elementary calculus. In 1928 at age 16, Turing encountered Albert Einstein's work, particularly in the questioning of Newton's laws of motion, which he reportedly managed to deduce by himself.
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