Biography (Early Life):
Alan Turing was born in June 23, 1912. At his early age he was separated from his parents due to the fact that they had been working overseas. When he was 13, he was to sent to Sherborne School which was a boarding school located in Dorset. The education system that was run there meant that his scientific mind wasn’t given any kind of encouragement and so he studied advanced science ideas by himself which was far ahead of the schools’ timetable and what he should’ve been learning at the time. He became less bored with school when he became attracted to another student called Christopher Morcom which meant he communicated more and became an academic success. However, Christopher suddenly died from tuberculosis. Turing was devastated by this and wanted to believe that he still lived on and his emotional turmoil included a fascination with the problem of the mind and brain which showed in his later work.
University:
In 1931, Turing got a scholarship to the University of Cambridge to study mathematics and he soon got a mathematics degree besting others with a distinction. After he graduated in 1934, he was awarded a fellowship in Kings College because of his work in probability theory. He was able to thrive in the culture at the college as this encouraged his scientific interests and as a gay man he was protected by the acceptance that the everyone had there. This made it so that he was on track for a distinguished mathematical career but his interest in finding practical uses for abstract mathematical ideas was going to push him in a different direction for his future.
In 1936, Turing released a paper that has been considered the foundation of computer science. He analysed what it meant for a human to follow a specific method for working things out. He invented the idea that of the ‘universal machine’ that would be able to decode or solve any set of problems. Later that, Turing moved to Princeton University to study for a PH. D in mathematical logic.
Code Breaking:
In 1938, Turing joined the Government Code and Cypher School and when the outbreak of war happened with Germany in September 1939, they moved headquarters to Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire. A few weeks beforehand, the Polish government had given France and Britain details of their successes against enigma which was used by Germans to encipher it’s military and naval signals. In 1932, a group of Polish mathematicians, The Enigma Machine
who were led by Marian Rejewski, had found out the internal wiring of the enigma and in 1938, the group had developed a code breaking machine that they called the Bomba (Polish for a type of ice cream). However, this machine had required certain operating procedures of the enigma to be used by the Germans and a change of those procedures in 1940, meant that the Bomba could no longer be used. During 1939 and 1940, Turing and the others designed a similar code breaking machine to the Bomba called the Bombe. In the war, the bombes supplied England and allies with lots of military information. In 1942, the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park decoded up to 39,000 messages each month and that rose to 84,000 a month which meant they decoded 2 messages every minute, day and night. In 1942, Turing also developed the first way to break the code-messages which the British called Tunny. At the end of the war, Turing was made an OBE (a knighthood) for his work during the war with the code breaking machines as this was said to have shortened the war by 2 years and maybe up to 4 years.
More on the Enigma Machine:
In 1918, the first rotorized cipher machine was patented by Arthur Scherbius. This machine developed to the enigma A and B in the early 1920’s but the sheer weight of them (50 kg) meant that they were too heavy for use by the military until the enigma D came out in 1927. The use of a reflector as the fourth motor meant that the enigma machine became much lighter and smaller than it had previously been beforehand. However, the code of the enigma D was broken in 1935 which meant that a front plug board had been introduced in order to scramble the signal further. When a fourth motor was added, this became a Wehrmacht enigma, which was used by the German military. The German navy also got this model of enigma machines but in 1942 they increased the amount of rotors to eight. The strategic importance of this device was that it could encode and decode vital information but it was best used by the navy to co-ordinate boat attacks well. The Germans used rudeltaktik which means pack tactic which functions like a wolf pack. If an enemy was spotted by a ship, they would radio an encoded message (done by the enigma devices) and all go attack the enemy ship.
Poland was the first nation that had managed to break the codes of the 1930 model machines. Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Rozicky were leading all of the efforts that the Polish had of breaking the codes and they invented the Bomba machine. The machine searched for the rotor settings by running different combinations of letters until it came to the right combination. But by 1939, this machine became useless because the enigma machine had become too complex for it and so it was left for the British to find a solution.
At Bletchley Park, the people there created another version of the Bomba. Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman came up with this new design which searched for ‘cribs’. The ‘cribs’ occurred repeatedly and Turing had discovered that ‘eins or ‘one’ occurred The Bombe
90% of the time in messages. Using these three words, they could work out the rotor settings used which would decode the entire message. This process was called ultra which had to be used carefully to ensure that the Germans did not know that their codes were being broken. Commander of the U-boat arm, Grossadmiral Karl Donitz monitored the proceedings closely. When German codes started being constantly broken in 1941 and the losses for Germany increased, the German navy complicated the design of the enigma even further by adding a fourth rotor and 6 more that were interchangeable. 10 months went by before these new codes were solved by the people at Bletchley Park.
When Turing found out that a fourth rotor had been introduced, he developed a newer version of the Bombe but the biggest breakthrough that allowed the British to break these codes was when codebook, that contained the daily rotor settings, were found in German Weatherboats. At this time, Bletchley Park had employed 7,000 people and many German communications had been heard at listening points over the UK. This all meant that allied shipping could avoid enemy ships and destroyer ships could then hunt down the enemy ships. Over 700 submarines and 30,000 German crewmen died at the Battle of the Atlantic. All of this meant that the war had been shortened by 3 years but Alan Turing and others were not recognised by people for their services until the 1970’s when the information about them all and the proceedings that had occurred were declassified for everyone to know.