The Turing Machine

It was on 3rd September 1939, that the United Kingdom and France declared war on Hitler-led Germany after it invaded Poland. It was also in 1939 that a group of mathematicians, cryptologists, and codebreakers had assembled in Bletchley Park, United Kingdom with the sole intent of breaking the much notorious Enigma. Enigma was an encryption device that was employed by the Nazi-Germany to communicate securely and without any threat of the Allies’ interception. The device consisted of an electromagnetic rotor that scrambled plain text into cryptic text and vice versa. Further, to amplify its protection, the German changed the machine settings every day so that the previous days’ messages could not be decoded.  The British Polish crypto analysts at Polish Cipher Bureau had already designed a special-purpose machine called ‘bomba’- by analyzing the cryptic texts transmitted from the Enigma. Interestingly, the Poles had been breaking Enigma messages for over six and a half years, but in 1938, the Germans upgraded the rotor-based security system of the Enigma. In July of 1939, the British acquired a model similar to that of the actual Enigma machine- built by cryptanalysts in Poland- called Enigma doubles. It was this upgrade in Enigma’s settings that catalyzed further Alan Turing’s endeavors during the Second World War which eventually led to the German defeat.  

The group at Bletchley Park worked under a secret wartime section in the Government Code and Cypher School known as Hut 6. The group was essentially appointed to decipher the incoming cryptic Enigma texts, but one of the mathematicians – Alan Turing- decided to rest for a more enduring solution. The Turing machine was invented in 1936 and was called the ‘a machine or the automatic machine by Alan Turing. The Turing machine is a simple abstract computational machine that is intended to help investigate the limitations and extent of what can be computed. By using the term ‘automatic machine’, Turing seemed to imply that at any given moment the behavior of the machine is determined by the current state or symbol being scanned. Essentially, it was a machine capable of enumerating some arbitrary subset of valid strings of an alphabet; these strings being a part of a recursively enumerable set. The Turing machine set the way for an artificial intelligence industry. It was based on this concept of a machine that Alan Turing devised several techniques for breaking German ciphers including the ameliorated bombe method. In the War, the need for such a machine came with Germans changing the machine settings for Enigma every day. Therefore, a text enciphered into a certain code one day would make no sense if fed into the Enigma the next day with the previous day’s settings. The military orders transmitted through the Enigma had already taken thousands of lives, and thus, the machine proved to be a tangible blessing for the Allies in 1941- being heavily dominated by the overzealous Germans. After its introduction in 1941, an intelligence unit was established in Britain – the British military intelligence, famously known as the Ultra division- which intercepted highly enciphered German radio and teleprinter communications at Bletchley Park. Alan Turing broke the form of Enigma that was used by the German U-boats that preyed on the North Atlantic merchant convoys. The merchant convoy was sent by the United States of America laden with supplies of food and other essentials for Britain. As observed later by many war veterans, this interference in the U-boats assault weakened Hitler’s control over the war considerably. Further, Turing also invented another new machine- codenamed Tunny- to break through a much more sophisticated German cipher machine. The Tunny communications network is considered to be a forerunner of the modern mobile phone network. This machine resulted in the fortification of the French coastline, which ultimately led to the invasion of Germany by Britain – preventing large numbers of rocket-propelled V2 missiles from raining down and wreaking havoc in southern Europe. The work of Alan Turing is believed to have changed the Second World War, shortening it by at least two years and saving millions of lives. 

I propose to consider the question, “Can machines think?”

Alan Turing- considered a prodigy of his time- paved the way for today’s artificial intelligence and networking sector. It was to the Allies’ privileged fate that Alan Turing happened to be the right person present at the right time. His mathematical paper, which published the basis of an algorithm-based machine that would be capable of performing any conceivable mathematical computation as long as it was represented by an algorithm. This published paper by Turing is easily considered to be one of the most influential papers in the history of maths. After initial development with German ciphers in Hut6, Turing led Hut8 for a time, which dealt in German naval cryptanalysis. In 1945, when the allies won the war, Turing stood alongside Churchill, Eisenhower, Douglas McArthur, and other war heroes to denote the leading figures in the victory over Hitler. Turing also devised the famous Turing Test in the field of Artificial Intelligence, for determining whether a computer can think like a human or not. Amidst these revolutionary developments, nevertheless, it was the mid-1900s. Alan Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for his homosexuality and was charged with ‘gross indecency’. To work on his research, he chose the option of chemical castration over the prison.  Yet, this choice, allegedly, proved to be much more of confinement than a physical prison. It is rumored that the chemical castration along with a DES ( Diethylstilbestrol) treatment took a heavy toll on Turing’s health. In 1954, Alan Turing died of suicide by cyanide poisoning. It is rumored that a half-bitten apple had been the culprit ( although it was never tested for cyanide). It is also rumored that the act of injecting an apple with cyanide was inspired by his favorite childhood fairytale story, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves – in which the stepmother of Snow White brews a poison in which an apple is soaked. In 2009, thither British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown made an official public apology for the way Turing was treated; and ultimately, Turing was granted a royal pardon in 2013 by Queen Elizabeth II. The things that could potentially be regarded as one of the positive assets in these atrociously cataclysmic times was the consequential “Alan Turing Law” which is an informal term under the Policing and Crime Act, 2017- pardoning men that were cautioned or conceived under the legislation that outlaws homosexual acts. 

Such was the course of events that can about in Bletchley Park – with one man manipulating the strings of history – from the Turing machine, the Turing test to the simple defeat of the U-boats which ultimately led to the Allies’ victory, and mail, the end of a catastrophic war. Alan Turing remains a confined war hero, pinned down by his times’ popular opinion. Though Alan Turing might have not got what he wanted from life, he gave the world what it ached for -momentary peace.