and Henryk Zygalski, to work on the decryption of the Enigma, a mechanical device for enciphering messages that the German military had begun using just a few years before. It emerged that in 1932 the Polish military had hired three mathematicians, Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki.
The success of the initial English embargo on any mention of their remarkable wartime cryptanalytic successes may be judged by the total absence of any mention of them in David Kahn’s encyclopedic 1967 book The Code-breakers which in contrast devoted an entire chapter to the US exploitation of Japanese codes and ciphers.Īll this changed after the publication in 1973 of General Gustav Bertrand’s book Enigma. It was only decades later that the scope and importance of Turing’s work at Bletchley Park – breaking German codes and ciphers – first became known. No hint was ever given of the nature of his secret work, nor has it ever been revealed. At first even his whereabouts were kept secret, but later it was divulged that he was working at Bletchley Park, Bletchley. Immediately on the declaration of war he was taken on as a temporary Civil Servant in the Foreign Office, in the Department of Communications …. In her 1959 biography of her son, Sarah Turing devoted just a short chapter to the war, noting: After World War II, Turing then turned to the foundations of computer science, including his famous popular paper on whether a machine can think, which introduced the “Turing test,” the original imitation game.īut for the period of the war itself, almost nothing was known of Turing’s activities. In order to do this Turing introduced the concept of what is now termed a “Turing machine,” a mathematical abstraction of an algorithm. In the years immediately prior to World War II, Turing had solved Hilbert’s Entscheidungsproblem, that is, the “decision problem,” whether there exists a mechanical procedure for determining if a mathematical statement expressed in a formal language has a proof.
In 1970, Alan Turing was best known for his work in two areas: mathematical logic and computer science. The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game.
0 kommentar(er)
