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First, Turing was awesome and what was done to him by the British government was criminal.
However, three brilliant Poles cracked Enigma long before Turing did. Those Poles were Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Różycki. As much as I enjoy reading and learning about Turing's early work with electric computers, the work Rejewski did with his team was even more impressive to me.
You can read more about these unsung heroes here.
Thanks for sharing. Super interesting read
Well. TIL. Never thought he was solely responsible, but still.
Recently read The Code Book by Singh and it covered the Poles and Turing. It's a layman's history about cryptography and is pretty good. I found it a little simplistic, but I figure I have a better than average understanding of the field due to my interest in computers. It was published in '99, but the current day cryptography it covers is still pretty relavant.
I learned about Rejewski and his team by going down an interesting rabbit hole. I was interested in writing an Enigma machine emulator in BASIC programming language for the vintage Commodore 64 as an exercise. So I started researching how the Enigma worked to figure out how to write the code. That revealed the whole interesting history of Enigma starting as a business machine sold to companies wanting to keep their communications private when communicating with other branches.
Then the early German military interest and the Poles started looking at it. Finally Rejewski and his team, which were already doing deciphering using older methods cracking the early 3 rotor Enigma. I was shocked I had never heard about this. I had heard of Turing and even made a transatlantic journey visiting Bletchely Park (great visit if you get a chance!). I looked for everything I could learn about the Polish codebreakers and their work and found only a few sources (in English).
This first was this book which is long since out-of-print, but I found a second hand copy online. This is the best chronicle of their work I have found to-date.
Enigma How the Poles broke the Nazi code
I found a couple of other books on Engima which mostly cover the British effort, but at least give some more acknowledgement to the groundbreaking Polish effort.
Lastly, there was a movie made in 1979 that dramatize the story. It is pretty faithful to the first book I found in recounting the events. That movie is Sekret Enigma (1979). You may or may not be able to watch the entire movie right now on Youtube (with English subtitles!) here. The acting and production values were surprisingly good! I enjoyed the movie.
Lastly, if you're diving into Enigma for history or understanding, I highly recommend building your own simple Enigma machine out of paper from a PDF! Its a single PDF that can be printed on a piece of paper. You cut out strips representing the rotors and move them back and forth to see each step of out the encoding and decoding works. Note, no plugboard in this, so it truly replicates the early 3-rotor, static reflector, no plugboard, Enigma machine. Paper Enigma download and instruction site here
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like a digital version of that book has ever been released. (Other than reference text, I almost exclusively read ebooks). I did grab the documentary, sounds interesting.
Any chance you can recommend a book that covers German cryptography and the OSS effort within Germany to spy on it before and during the war?
From what I understand from diagrams and descriptions, it was a surprisingly simple device. Especially before the plugboard. I haven't tried to run the numbers or played with it, but I would think just an 8bit microcontroller could break enigma encoding in seconds or less.
When it comes to mechanical math devices, should I ever get to retire or be rich: I want to reproduce a Curta Calculator. Super neat devices.
Another similar device that I've used is the dividing or indexing head. They are used to precisely locate angled machining operations such as hobbing gears, cutting bolt heads, accurate bolt hole circles, etc.
I've had that in my bookshelf for a couple of years now, it might be time to actually read it soon...
Explanation: Alan Turing was a mathematician and computer scientist whose revolutionary work during WW2 helped the British shorten the war considerably by breaking (and thus having access to) Nazi coded messages.
A little over half a decade after the war, a chance break-in at his house led to him accidentally incriminating himself - by admitting to the presence of his boyfriend. This being the 1950s UK, the courts gave him a choice for the horrific crime of homosexuality - chemical castration, or several months in prison. Turing considered that he would not last in prison, and opted for the chemical treatment. Some time later, he bit into an apple laced with cyanide and died, which many consider to be an act of suicide (though it is still disputed, some believe it was genuinely an accident).
How do you "accidentally" lace an apple with cyanide? Was that just a common thing they had lying around back then, like plutonium in 1985?
He was using a series of chemicals, including cyanide to make electronics with deposited gold. He was not proficient at it and colleagues noted he was experimenting and he frequently made mistakes.
Don't all apples have cyanide by default?
Not enough of it to kill you!
Haven't you heard "An apple a day is my mithridatism that keeps my assassin away"?
Only if you get them from dubious old ladies knocking at your door.
Jokes aside. The kernels contain a small and harmless amount of cyanides.
Peach pits
In the 1950s Ultra (the code name for the massive British project that regularly decrypted German radio communications) was still a state secret. The reasons for maintaining this secrecy long after the end of the war aren't fully known, but German encryption devices (of which Enigma was one) had been sold to many countries around the world and Britain probably wanted to preserve the possibility of reading their secret communications if necessary (the machines used for this had been destroyed and the personnel disbursed, so this wasn't something Britain was still doing at this point).
So it would not have been possible for anyone to weigh in on Turing's behalf and publicly point out how instrumental he had been in helping to win the war. But surely someone like Churchill (who was still alive) could have interceded behind the scenes. Truly shameful that nobody did.
Tommy Flowers built colossus Turing made rules for programming it and yet flowers is basically unknown and Turing is known for flowers work and being discriminated against.
Flowers literally threw his chosen career away for the benefit of society and we still don't recognize him in a meaningful way.
Hell, look at how many people died or were crippled for life fighting fascism, and we honor their supreme sacrifice ... by bringing back fucking fascism.
And he wasn't pardoned until December 24th 2013 by the Queen. It also resulted in The Alan Turing Law. The hypocrisy is palpable because of how they're hunting transgender people right now, they didn't learn a single thing.
hunting
The hounds, the red jackets, the bugle
All that work for a bigoted country.
All that work to stop the Nazis from conquering the whole of Europe and continuing their genocide, you mean?
Are you suggesting that the perfect and the good should not be enemies? I sure hope not, because that would be offensive.
Yeah such a bigoted country where the choice of punishment was prison time or chemical castration, unlike Germany at the time where being gay meant... (checks notes) being sent to a concentration camp, worked brutally literally to the bone, and then gassed to death.
Let's also not forget other bigoted countries at the time like, to pick a purely random example, Canada. Homosexuality still criminalised until 1969 (2 years after the UK decriminalised it) where the punishment was 10 years to life in prison.
Strange; similar prison terms for the UK at the time. I wonder if there's some reason why Canada and the UK had almost identical laws until 1931.
Anyway, this still doesn't justify the mistreatment of Alan Turing or any other member of the LGBTQ+ community at the time, after decriminalisation (see the whole story of Stonewall and places like Canal Street), or even now with the bullshit bathroom laws.
The best thing we all can do is learn from history and fight tooth and nail for the future. Because as Regan, Maggie, and Trump have shown us, some fuckers want to drag us backwards, and I for one, am not going to let them.
Homosexual acceptance is a very new thing in the West. Always two steps forward, one back, but I don't think young people can really internalize how bad it was just a couple of decades back.
Yeah such a bigoted country where the choice of punishment was prison time or chemical castration, unlike Germany at the time where being gay meant... (checks notes) being sent to a concentration camp, worked brutally literally to the bone, and then gassed to death.
Turing was convicted after WWII, in 1952. There were no concentration camps back then. Legally, concentration camps have never been a mean of punishment of criminality, like prisons. People were not detained in CCs due to the rule of a court in a criminal case.
In German criminal law, homosexuality between men (aged over 21) was punished with up to 10 years prison in 'severe cases'. Which was the official legislation from the Nazi era (1935) present until 1969.
https://www.forum-recht-online.de/2005/205/205steinke.htm (in German)
I'm sure it will be of great comfort to the people who died in the camps to learn that their murder by the Nazis was illegal, actually.
That's not what I said.
Turing's Imitation Game was about how Artificial Intelligence could be proven when it's indistinguishable from a human.
The flaw with the Imitation Game is the assumption that humans are intelligent.
and these are the "good old days" the conservatives want to return to
I think the "good old days" for them are closer to the Assyrian empire.
It WAS good for them, nobody dared question their bigotry.
Almost single-handedly? That’s taking things too far.
Well, we do a little exaggeration in memes
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Career_and_research
Have a read of the above link. Obviously, he was part of a team and many people were involved but it's also pretty apparent that without him Enigma likely wouldn't have been cracked.
The myth of "great men" is usually bullshit but in this case that's not the case. He was an eccentric genius who advanced computing and cryptography massively. He did almost singlehandedly reduce the length of the war. Yes others were involved and also essential, but without Turing the war would very likely have been longer.
Due to the challenges answering questions concerning what an outcome would have been if a historical event did or did not occur (the realm of counterfactual history), it is hard to estimate the precise effect Ultra intelligence had on the war.[98] However, official war historian Harry Hinsley estimated that this work shortened the war in Europe by more than two years. He added the caveat that this did not account for the use of the atomic bomb and other eventualities.[99]
It is a rare experience to meet an authentic genius. Those of us privileged to inhabit the world of scholarship are familiar with the intellectual stimulation furnished by talented colleagues. We can admire the ideas they share with us and are usually able to understand their source; we may even often believe that we ourselves could have created such concepts and originated such thoughts. However, the experience of sharing the intellectual life of a genius is entirely different; one realizes that one is in the presence of an intelligence, a sensibility of such profundity and originality that one is filled with wonder and excitement. Alan Turing was such a genius, and those, like myself, who had the astonishing and unexpected opportunity, created by the strange exigencies of the Second World War, to be able to count Turing as colleague and friend will never forget that experience, nor can we ever lose its immense benefit to us.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hilton
Peter John Hilton (7 April 1923[1] – 6 November 2010[2]) was a British mathematician, noted for his contributions to homotopy theory and for code-breaking during World War II.[3]
Bro, he lost his left hand in a coal mining accident. Don’t be insensitive.
almost no handedly
Doesn't matter what you do, that's how some people pay back if you don't fit their ideals. I think about it every time someone mentions Turing.
Yep, and he deserves better than this meme.
