Alan Turing – By Edoardo
Alan Turing was born in London, England, in 1912. He is a very influential character in history, although unlike most historical figures his influence becomes stronger as time goes on.
Turing was a genius from the beginning and his brilliance was evident even when he was in pre-school. Minders ant teachers alike were always highly impressed with his logical and mathematical abilities. In 1926 he was supposed to attend his first day of boarding school in Sherborne. It was an expensive private school, but his family were wealthy and he could afford to go and develop his logical and mathematical abilities. Unfortunately, the first day coincided with the 1926 general strike. This, however, did not stop young Turing, who, aged 13, cycled the 100km to school over 2 days, unaccompanied, stopping overnight in an inn. At the age of 16 Turing encountered
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All in all the military Enigma has 158,962,555,217,826,360,000 (nearly 159 quintillion) different settings.
Turing invented the Bombe method of cracking the codes3. It is estimated that Turing, in his late 20's, shortened the war by around 3 years and saved a minimum of 14 million lives by cracking the Enigma. It allowed the allies to understand messages that the Germans thought were completely encrypted. This came at a moral cost, however; the British Government often had to allow innocents to be killed to fool the Nazis into thinking that the Allies could not understand the codes.
Turing later fathered Artificial Intelligence by creating the first chess computer4, which could do what had previously been thought to have been a purely human characteristic. He more Importantly invented the Turing Machine and Turing