Alan Turing Research Paper

Alan Turing was not recognized for his achievements during his lifetime; however, he is one of the most notable scientists and mathematicians of modern times. Born on June 23, 1912 to Julius Mathison and Ethel Sara Turing, he and his brother John were fostered into various homes while their father worked in India. The foster care facilities suppressed any ideas of innovation, imagination, and creativity. This only pushed Turing’s interest for science even further. At thirteen, Turing was sent to the Sherborne School (Hodges Alan Turing Scrapbook). The schools strict lesson plan forbade Turing from escalating his scientific ideas and studies. He decided to study concepts such as relativity on his own, jeopardizing his diploma from the Sherborne …show more content…
The Germans would also start and end messages with the same phrases such as, “weather” or “Heil Hitler”. This would not completely solve the message, but it could help the code breakers in determining how the machine was set up for that day. Since it was impossible to decode these messages by hand, Turing, along with the other cryptologists at Bletchley Park adapted the Polish Bombe machine. A bombe was also an electromagnetic device that was set up similar to the enigma. The bombe was created to determine which rotor was in place, and the order of the rotors. This machine consisted of twelve different rotor variations (Underwood Industrialization of Codebreaking). Turing revised the bombe by also making it recognize certain “cribs”. A crib is an algorithm of letters which match up to the cipher letters. To figure out if a message was lined up correctly, Turing had to make sure a letter did not match up to itself. It was easier to find cribs in the formulaic messages such as the “Heil Hitler” and “weather”. After finding the correct placement of the letters, it would take approximately eighteen minutes to find the correct rotor and then proceed to descramble the message. Alan Turing decoded the enigma and now knew most of the German’s secrets (Turing Computing Machinery and …show more content…
The allies decided that the best plan of action would be to trick the German’s into where they would strike next. Historian Ben Macintyre said, “The idea, very simply, was to get a dead body, equip the dead body with false papers, and then drop it somewhere the Germans would find it” ( Dead Man Floating: World War IIs Oddest Operation). Originally, the allies were supposed to invade Sicily. However, the false documents said the allies would invade Greece. Somehow this genius idea worked, and the German troops moved from protecting Sicilian borders to protecting Greek borders. The hoax of an attack saved over a thousand allied lives, overthrew the Italian dictator, and changed the course of the war. After that encounter, Cryptologists were told to focus on the messages being sent back and forth from the German unterseeboots, more commonly referred to as U-boats( Rafferty U-Boat). They were under see boats that the Germans used to secretly attack the Allies. The Allies could now figure out where these boats were going. They could either plan for attacks or get away if they were not prepared. Due to the fact that the allies now had the advantage of knowing where these U-boats were, they could now plan to sink them. This was a crucial part to winning the war. In the end, the Allies sunk about seven hundred and eighty three U-boats. None of this would have been possible without