Alan Turing: The Amazing Code Breaker

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Alan Turing: The Amazing Code Breaker Alan Turing was one of the most influential people in WWII. He made a machine to break the German codes that gave the Allied Forces lots of needed military intelligence. Historians believe that his work at Bletchley Park helped cut the war by 2 years (Ferro 3). Alan Mathison Turing was born on June 23, 1912, in London, England. His father worked for the Indian Civil Service, so his parents would leave Alan and his brother in England when they would travel to India. As a kid, Turing went to the top private schools and continually showed signs of being very smart from a young age. By age 14, he was solving advanced problems without having taken a course on them. At age 16, he read of Einstein 's work, not …show more content…

He proposed to make many small machines, each with one specific task, called Turing Machines. The Turing Machines would be able to solve one type of math problem. He thought of a “universal computer” that would be able to compute anything a human could (Ferro 1). In 1936, Turing presented a paper,”On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” which was the first time the idea of a computer was written down. The modern computer has been based on Turing’s paper. Later, around the mid-1940s, Turing was designing the Automatic Computing Engine. He created a blueprint that could be used for computers. Along with creating the idea and helping with designs, Turing wanted to know how smart computers were. He created the “Turing Test,” which was an intelligence design standard for technology. A similar test is still used today. (“Alan Turing” 2). Though the Automatic Computing Engine was not completed, Turing still tried to make a game for computers. He created an algorithm to make computer chess that could think two moves ahead and picked the best moves possible. Since his computer ACE was never built, he made the coding on paper (Ferro