Shortly after World War I, a German Engineer named ARTHUR SCHERBIUS, developed a machine that resembled a typewriter which was called ENIGMA. A machine that was used for sending messages or communicating secretly during World War II by the Germans. The typewriter had letters for typing in and each letter had a lamp associated with it.
Whenever somebody pressed any key for writing the message, which was a plain text, the enciphered letter use to lit up its lamp. It contained a number of rotors (which were interchangeable )in it, in order to keep the cipher changing continuously.
The possible number of combinations was huge, so huge that the Germans and everybody thought it was unbreakable.
But they were hit hard by a group of people at a yard at HUT 8, BLETCHLEY PARK working hard to break the code. They were later joined by ALAN TURING who stood to be the one to not give up till the end and kept working hard and was finally able to build a counter to ENIGMA, which was called BOMBE.
The codes began breaking and a lot of lives got saved because of this in WWII.
ALAN TURING was a brilliant mathematician, a cryptanalyst, a logician, and a pioneer in Computer Science born in London in 1912. He studied at both Cambridge and Princeton Universities. He was already working part-time for the British Government’s Code and Cypher School even before World War II broke out.
In 1939, he took a full time at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire where the top-secret work was going on to decipher the Enigma codes.
The main aim was to crack the Enigma codes. Many Mathematicians determined how to read the codes but the main problem was that the Germans sharply changed the cipher system daily, which made it more difficult and challenging. However, it was finally broken down and deciphered.
To this day, our communications networks are built on top of Claude Shannon’s ideas, while our computing devices, processors, and chips are built upon Turing’s ideas.
Turing’s contribution to modern computing was so significant that the prestigious A.M. Turing Award, sometimes known as the Nobel Prize of Computer Science, is named after him.
This great Computer Pioneer even declared it before that machines would think one day. He wrote a paper about it, have a read.
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