Alan Turing lived a life shrouded in secrecy. His work on the German Enigma code, which Winston Churchill called “the greatest contribution to the war effort”, remained under the Official Secrets Act long after his death. For a long time, his homosexuality meant that his role as the father of computer science was greatly downplayed. Despite all this, today he is known as one of the most famous cryptographers in history, a position more than earned thanks to his achievements. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayAlan Turing was born on June 23, 1912. When he was only one year old, his mother, to join his father in India, left him and his older brother with a retired army colonel and his wife. Turing attended a public boarding school. It was there that his scientific curiosity and romantic nature began to take shape. His unsupervised chemical experiments, unconventional approach to mathematics, and low grades in English prompted the principal to write, in a letter to his parents, "If he wishes to remain in public school, he must aspire to educate himself. If he wishes to be exclusively one science specialist, is wasting his time in public school. However, his studies were not entirely wasted, as he fell unrequitedly in love with a student a few grades above him, Christopher Morcom. They became friends and briefly collaborated on scientific experiments, but their relationship ended when Morcom died suddenly in February 1930. Despite his mediocre grades, Turing won a mathematics scholarship to King's College, Cambridge. aged 22, he was elected a fellow of King's College for a thesis in which he proved the central limit theorem, although it had already been proved in 1922 by Jarl Lindeberg. In 1936, Turing left England for Princeton University, where he made his first major contribution to computing. One of the greatest mathematical challenges of the time was the Entscheidungsproblem. The Entscheidungsproblem, in short, is the question of whether there is a definite method that can be applied to a preposition to decide whether a preposition is provable. The main problem was that the question, the answer to which required a concrete definition of method, contained both philosophical and mathematical elements. At the end of 1936, Turing published his paper "On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem". This article turned out to be fundamental not for mathematics, but for computer science. First, Turing replaced the arithmetic basis of the Entscheidungsproblem and the various proposed solutions with simple, hypothetical devices that later became known as Turing machines. He established that these machines would be able to perform any mathematical calculation as long as it was done in an algorithm. He then went on to demonstrate that there was no solution to the Entscheidungsproblem because it is not possible to decide algorithmically whether a Turing machine will ever stop. In one fell swoop, Turing had established the mechanical computability of everything computable and created the concept of the modern computer. Turing, upon his return to Cambridge in 1938, began working part-time at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS). He was particularly interested in the German Enigma code. Poland had developed Bomba, which could decrypt Enigma, but relied on an indicator procedure that the Germans were likely to change, as they did in May 1940. Turing sought a less insecure procedure. and had produced a theoretical specification of the “bombe” even before arriving at Bletchley Park in 1939. The bombe was a machine whichit calculated which sockets of the Enigma machine were connected to which other sockets on the day in question and which wheel the order inside the machine was. Turing couldn't design a machine that did this directly, as there were too many potential configurations of the sockets and wheels. Instead he designed the bomb so that, through a series of logical deductions, it ruled out as many panel socket connections and wheel orders as possible, leaving only a few to try to discover manually. If one of these deductions were impossible, the bombe would test another set of hypotheses, then another, and so on, until he found a set of hypotheses that did not produce impossible results. These possible hypotheses were relatively few, so cryptographers manually tested them on an Enigma replica to see which one was correct. The first bomb, planted in Bletchley Park on 18 March 1940, was a failure. The bomb, powerful in theory, only worked in practice if cryptographers identified words, or “cribs,” that the bomb could use to crack the code. Turing's original machine required much longer bases than cryptographers could imagine. The answer to this problem came from fellow codebreaker Gordon Welchman. Welchman realized that Turing's original bomb only made a deduction based on the given scenario before moving on to the next one. Therefore, the bomber could easily take the wrong path and thus start the series of deductions again. Welchman proposed that the bomb could be adapted to take into account other possibilities, eliminating the need to start over every time it hit a dead end. Although Turing was initially skeptical of the changes, he quickly accepted the changes. He also added his own modification: “simultaneous scanning”. The original bomb required cryptographers to test one supposed card socket at a time. Simultaneous scanning allowed cryptographers to see whether a plug was connected to any other outlet. Armed with these modifications, the next attempt to create a bomb was successful. Despite being Bletchley Park's most successful codebreaker and head of Hut 8, Turing was not popular among his peers. He had a reputation for being eccentric and some have suggested he would have been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome if he had been examined today. His only interest in finding the Naval Enigma code, in his own words, was "because no one else was doing anything about it and I could have it all to myself." He ran long distances of up to 40 miles because it "gave him time to think" and rode to work on a broken bicycle while wearing a gas mask. Her teacup chained her to a radiator with a padlock. As for his personality, he was a loner who refused to meet anyone's eyes and ran away from anyone who attempted to start a conversation, especially women. He once told one of his colleagues that he hated spending time with women because "they open their mouths and say such trivial things, it's like a frog jumped out." The only significant relationship he ever had with a woman was in 1941, when he became engaged to Joan Clarke, one of Bletchley Park's most intelligent cryptographers and his good friend. He called off the engagement a few months later, shortly after telling Clarke he was homosexual. She and he remained close friends for the rest of his life. Turing traveled to the United States in 1942 to help their cryptographers build their bomb. He was not impressed with the design of the American bomb. During his time in America, he also assisted Bell Laboratories in creating a 1950.