Alan Turing Achievements

The Inner Workings of Alan Turing Alan Turing had once stated that “we can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done” and surely enough, Alan did more than anyone could imagine (Hom). Alan Turing, an accomplished mathematician, philosopher, codebreaker, strange visionary, and a gay man, ("Alan Turing: the Enigma") was not always known for his accomplishments towards technology. Turing tended to be very aloof and most of his contributions to the world were created in secret or in the privacy of his home (Ferris) but nevertheless his technological breakthroughs continue to modernize and revolutionize old ideas of technology and what it can be used for. Turing managed to break the “unbreakable” Nazi

Alan Turing became a hero when it was discovered that during World War 2, he was a “secret asset for the allies” (Hom) and part of an elite team of “codebreakers” at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park where he and his colleagues were bent on breaking the Nazi Enigma Code ("Alan Mathison Turing"), created by the Nazis in order to keep planned airstrikes, U-boat attacks, and other war related plans of action out of reach from the Allies. In order to break the code, Turing created his own “Bombe”, which was a machine that could “rapidly decode the 158 million, million, million variations used by the Nazis in their commands” ("The Turing Enigma"). Alan Turing’s “Bombe” was eventually able to break its first portion of the Enigma Code in early January of 1940 (Hodges 235), which enabled the Allies to track the movements and sink the notorious German U-boat titled U-559 in October of 1942. (Hodges 303). Turing became known for this “Turing Machine” which in modern terms is now referred to as a computer with related hardware and software(xvi). After his accomplishments at Bletchley Park, Turing continued theorizing and creating high speed processing devices because of his belief “that technology could think like a human” which would lead to the foundation of modern computer science (Hom). Alan Turing is also credited for his “Turing Test” which is “a test for determining whether a machine can be claimed to be thinking” ("Alan Mathison