80 kilometers northwest of London is Bletchley Park. In 1938 the British MI6 had chosen it as one of its operations centers, in particular, as the headquarters of its cryptography team. Bletchley Park thus became Station X.
In the summer of 1939 a small group of cryptanalysts headed there disguised as members of ‘Captain Ridley’s Shooting Team’. His mission: to break the Nazi Enigma cipher machine. The odds of success were one in 150 trillion. Who was in charge of that team was a brilliant mathematician named Alan Turing.
The Germans had developed a cipher machine much like a portable typewriter, the Enigma , in which the operator entered the original text and its circuitry converted it to encryption. The Nazi army depended on these machines for their actions of war. Thanks to her and to a new concept of conceiving war, the Germans destroyed the French army -considered the strongest in the world- in 34 days and entered Paris. Submarine warfare in the Atlantic, with Admiral Doenitz’s German U -boats sinking supply convoys from the United States, depended on Enigmas .
The Poles, and more specifically a brilliant young mathematician named Marian Rejewski, had broken Enigma in 1932 , when the German army had been testing it in their maneuvers. They even built a duplicate. With the arrival of the war, all the knowledge accumulated by the Poles passed into British and French hands. The encryption key was changed daily, forcing cryptanalysts to find it before they could decrypt Nazi messages. Enigma ‘s internal configuration could be arranged in any number of possible ways, and the probability of finding it by chance was 150 quintillion to 1. Now, the British had two big cards: mistakes made by German operatives and a mistake by the Germans. fundamental design of the Enigma: a letter could not be encoded as itself, that is, the A could not appear encrypted as A.
From computer to artificial intelligence
It was there, at Bletchley Park, that Turing succeeded in turning the odds in his favour. To do this, he designed the so-called “bombs”, electromechanical devices that reduced the time needed to find the Enigma day key, so that if things went well they could locate it in just under an hour. These bombs were the precursor to the development of what some consider to be the world’s first computer, Colossus , which was created to break the German Lorenz code used by Hitler to send orders to his generals. In this way the allies were able to know in advance the orders sent to the German clothes and, above all, to the “wolf packs” of Admiral Doenitz. Paraphrasing Churchill when he praised the work of the pilots during the Battle of Britain, “Never have so many owed so much to so few.” Unfortunately, there were no congratulations or medals because all the work of the Turing team was classified as secret, and nothing was heard of it until many decades later.
This achievement would have been enough for Alan Turing to go down in the history of science, but in reality he has his place in it for being considered the father of artificial intelligence . In fact, he was the first to propose the test with which to demonstrate when a computer can be considered to have intelligence: it is what is known as the Turing test .
The test itself is a challenge. A judge, sitting in a room, receives the answers to the questions he asks another human being and a machine. The mission of this judge is to find out, through these questions, which of the two is the human being . Of course both the human and the machine are allowed to lie or make mistakes when answering the questions in writing. If the judge is unable to distinguish who is who, we will assume that the machine is an intelligent being.
The crime of being gay
The saddest, most degrading and cruel part of Turing’s life occurred when he was accused and tried for “gross indecency and sexual perversion”, the same charges that the writer Oscar Wilde received half a century earlier . Turing did not defend himself against the charges because he considered that being homosexual was not a crime, but British law thought otherwise and he was convicted. He was offered a choice: go to prison or undergo chemical castration. She chose estrogen injections, which produced important physical alterations, such as the appearance of breasts or an appreciable weight gain. Two years after the trial, in 1954, Turing died of ingesting a cyanide-poisoned apple : a curious tribute to Snow White. Everything points to it being a suicide.
In 2009 a media campaign was launched for the British government to apologize for what it did to the mathematician. However, in 2012 the British government of Cameron denied clemency to the scientist, arguing that homosexuality was then considered a crime. Finally, on December 24, 2013, almost half a century after the death of the great mathematician, he finally received a pardon by order of Queen Elizabeth II.
References:
Leavitt, D. (2007) Alan Turing: The Man Who Knew Too Much, Antoni Bosch
