Alan Turing

Alan Turing was born June 23, 1912 in London. His most impressive achievement arose from attempting to create a machine that could accomplish any task. He wanted to create a machine that would later become that basis for the modern computer. He worked endlessly to break the “incomputable” and he achieved such a feat. He used his “Turing Machine” to crack the uncrackable German enigma code. The enigma machine had stumped the entire cryptographic department of Britain for the entirety of the second world war and it was used for messages to be sent, masked in secrecy, to the German troops. Turning applied his generalized approach to a preexisting machine called a Bombe to be able to decode German messages from local assumptions made of text in the German messages, such as repeated text. The Germans would change the input code of the enigma machines each morning and with each morning a repetitive weather report would be sent out and the modified Bombe could decipher the code from there. Turing played a critical role in the second world war and without his genius, out of the box thinking there is every chance that the Germans would have maintained the element of surprise and the world could look very different today. Turing spent the remaining portion of his life focused on developing the modern computer and even put research into what is now called neural nets. In my opinion, Alan Turing lived a bit of a tortured life, as his homosexuality was looked down upon in the early 1900’s, and he took what life had given him and left a legacy that can only be described as heroic. The world itself would not be nearly as advanced without the genius that is Alan Turing.