Alan Turing And ENIGMA!

I am keen of historical and scientific genre movies, recently I watched a movie called The Imitation Game well after watching the masterpiece I got to know that it is based on a true story about a famous mathematician Alan Mathison Turing known as “The Father of Modern Computer”.

We always study Charles Babbage the father of the computer but never heard of this man who made the modern computing possible Alan Turing one of the most famous mathematicians who broke the unbreakable machine “Enigma” and helped the UK government in World War II.

Well if you haven’t watched the movie yet watch it because in this article you are going to have some Spoilers. In the movie you will see how Turing struggled to build a method called “the bombe,” an electromechanical device that could detect the settings for ENIGMA, allowing the machine to decipher German encrypted messages which were sent by Nazi’s to attack the UK. According to sources “The imitation game” is 49% based on a true occurrence of what happened in World War II.

https://twitter.com/GCHQ/status/1275333272768262144

The movie portrays both Alan’s job and personal life, Alan was born on 23rd June 1912 in London, England. He studied in Sherborne School and got his BA and MA degree from the University of Cambridge, and studied his Ph.D. from Princeton University. At a very early age, Turing met his only love Christopher in school. In the movie we see he named the machine Christopher but in reality, the machine is called “the bombe” also goes by the name “victory”.

Alan approached the Bletchley park where a group of great cryptanalysis and mathematicians got hired for breaking the enigma code. Alan Turing invented the machine “The Bombe” to encrypt the encoded communication of German by the Enigma.

ENIGMA:

An Enigma machine is an illustrious encryption machine used by the Germans during World War II to transmit coded communications between Nazi Germans and the Government. The Enigma machine allows for billions of ways to encode a message, making it incredibly difficult for any other nation to crack German codes during the war for a long period. Enigma is a highly defined machine that is simple at work but exasperating to break, Enigma looks like a typewriter when you enter the first letter of your message it will convert it into an encrypted version which is very hard to decipher.

The Bombe:

The Turing Bombe machine was a special purpose electro-mechanical system used during WWII to crack Enigma’s encrypted messages regarding German military operations. Turing built the bombe to capture keys of passwords to fetch Nazis hidden messages, people always get confused the bombe was some sort of computer but it wasn’t a computer it was a programmable machine to encode the messages of enigma The goal of the bombe each day is to find the German key. Once the key was found it was easy to decrypt all day messages which was sent by the Nazis.

Alan Turing Life After WWII:

This story of Alan Turing and his companions known as the “codebreakers” kept secret for years after WWII. Alan Turing was engaged to Joan Clarke to hide his sexuality from the government but later he broke his engagement with her. Alan Turing was a closeted gay man in that era of early 19’s when homosexuality was outlawed in England. In 1952 he was sentenced for “Gross Indecency” because he admitted to being gay even on probation he never once disclose that he is a hero who literally helped the UK intelligence in World War II and saved many lives.

Alan Mathison Turing contributed a lot to the society but his amazing work in technology such as

• The Universal Turing Machine
• The bombe
• Turing Manchester Projects
• Alan’s Design of Automatic Computing Engine
• Turing’s Design Document ‘Proposed Electronic Calculator’

And many more accomplishments, Alan Turing devoted his life to science and technology, his death was a mystery at first one day after his probation he found dead in his house by an eaten apple at his side autopsy said Turing had four ounces of cyanide in his stomach, which concluded that he had committed suicide by drinking cyanide.