Quote from: Lori Dee on April 02, 2025, 05:46:03 PM...
Have you seen the movie, "The Imitation Game"? About Alan Turing and his Turing Machines. It's a good one.
It is a good movie. Some of the story is speculation, of course, e.g. that Britain deliberately allowed some targets to be attacked so that the enemy would not learn that their codes had been cracked or even so that America would be more likely to join the war effort. Even if those things had been done, I doubt that Turing would have been involved in the decision.
From what I have gathered, Bletchley Park rarely knew from the first translation of a code what the enemy target was, as that would be a code word in itself. For example, on learning that a major city was going to be attacked in force, Churchill returned to London, presuming it was the most likely target. It turned out to be Coventry but he is still sometimes accused of deliberately not warning Coventry of the attack.
Britain's usual technique for hiding new discoveries from the enemy was to make up other plausible explanations, e.g. when Britain's night fighters significantly increased their kill rate, it was attributed to eating carrots rather than radar. (I once attended a lecture in which we were told, using Odysseus, as an example, "Never tell the truth if a lie will work just as well." Some people live by that although I don't think that it would work for me. Of course, I could be lying.)
I think that Turing's tragic story has overshadowed the achievements of others at Bletchley Park and other sites. I saw a documentary which highlighted an American at Bletchley Park whose insights were as brilliant and important as Turing's but I sadly cannot remember his name. Then there was Tommy Flowers, the Post Office engineer who used his own money to create the computer that Turing emvisaged. I think that Britain only partially recompensed him after quite a long post-war struggle.
Although the algorithms used in Tommy Flowers' creation were modifiable, they were still hardware based. I gather that the first scientist to publish a paper showing that computer programs operating on data could be input as data themselves was the prolific American mathematician Von Neumann. That is the software model that is still used today.
