Turing Machine: The rise of artificial Intelligence
Jigeesh Prajapati
When the Time magazine published its list of the 100 most important people of the twentieth century, they mentioned the name of mathematician Alan Turing in that list and said of him,
“The fact remains that everyone who tips at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing Machine.”
Alan Turing, the name later regarded as the hero of world war-2, was born in London 1912, before the two years of the world war-1 broke out. After the first-world war, Germany had developed a machine called Enigma for sending secret messages. Enigma was an electro-mechanical rotor machine used for encryption and decryption of secret messages which are not supposed to be revealed to enemies. The idea of using the Enigma for military purpose was brought by Nazis, which was developed mainly for business purpose in the commercial sector. The Nazis adopted the idea of this machine and developed it until it became the heart of communication. Enigma technology was continuously altered, breaking of whose code was next to impossible. The Enigma technology was so nicely developed that the codes were supposed to be undecipherable for even those who has another Enigma machine.
Enigma allowed an operator to type in a message and scrambles it by using three to five notched wheels, or rotors, which displayed different letters of the alphabet. The receiver needed to know the exact setting of these rotors in order to reconstitute the coded text. Over the time the basic machine became more complicated as German code experts added plug with electronic circuits.
With German invasion imminent in 1939, the poles opted to share their secrets with the British and Britain’s government code and cipher school at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, became the centre for allied efforts to keep up with dramatic war - included changes in enigma output.
The German were convicted that Enigma output could not be broken, so they used the machine for all sorts of communications on the battlefield, in the sky and significantly within its secret service.
Although the outbreak of world war-2 was triggered by Germany’s invasion of Poland, the causes of the world war-2 were more complex and lies in the treaty of Versailles. In 1919, Lloyd George of England, Orlando of Italy, Clemenceau of France and Woodrow Wilson from the U.S met to discuss how Germany was to be made to pay for the damage world war-1 had caused and this produced the treaty of Versailles. According to this treaty, apart from accepting the blame of starting the world war-1, Germany had to pay 6,600 million pounds as reparation caused by the First World War and in addition Germany was only allowed to have a small army and six naval ships. Rhineland area was to be de-militarized and union was Austria was to be forbidden.
People of Germany were not very happy with this treaty. People of Germany were very poor at the time and the opportunities for jobs were nearly zero. So it was nearly impossible for Germany to pay this much amount of money. In January 1933, Adolf Hitler became the chancellor of Germany and almost immediately began secretly building up Germany’s army and weapons. Till 1934, he had created a German air-force apart from increasing the size of German army.
In 1936 Adolf Hitler ordered German troops to enter the Rhineland and made some two important alliances. The first was called the Rome-Berlin axis pact and allied Hitler’s Germany with Mussolini’s Italy. The second was called the anti-comitern pact and allied Germany with Japan.
In 1938 Hitler’s army marched into Austria. The Austrian leader was forced to hold a vote asking the people whether they wanted to be a part of Germany. The result of the vote were promising for Hitler and 99% of Austrian people wanted union with Germany. The Austrian leader asked Britain, France and Italy for aid. Hitler promised that it was the end of his expansionist aims and not wanting to risk war, other country did nothing.
Hitler did not keep his words and six months later demanded that the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia be handed over to Germany. Neville Chamberlain, Prime minister of Britain, met with Hitler three times during September 1938 to try to reach an agreement that would prevent war. The Munich agreement stated that Hitler could have the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia provided that he promised not to invade the rest of Czechoslovakia.
Hitler was not a man of his word and in March 1939 invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia. Despite calls for help from Czechoslovakia government, neither Britain nor France was prepared to take military action against Hitler. However, some action was now necessary and believing that Poland would be Hitler’s next target, both Britain and France promised that they would take military action against Hitler if he invaded Poland. Chamberlain believed that, faced with the prospect of war against Britain and France, Hitler would stop his aggression. Chamberlain was wrong. German troops invaded Poland on 1st September 1939, which triggered the world war-2. On the 3rd September 1939, the Britain and the France declared that the war was on.
After the day world war-2 was broken out, the British government was not in a good position. German U-boats were really doing some terrific destruction to the valuable assets. Not only European countries but also U.S was under the terror of German U-boats. During the first 3 months of 1942, German U-boats sank more than 100 ships off the east coast of North America in the gulf of Mexico and in the Caribbean sea.
Britishers had set up a section at Bletchley park. ( British world war-2 code breaking section) British government had gathered really some wonderful brains whose main work was to decode the secret messages sent by the German navy and German military containing important information regarding their attacking strategy and timing and various position of submarines and U-boats. The code braking section was called Hut-8. If Hut-8 somehow manages to break the secret codes, they could save their country from German destruction in addition to save lives of millions of soldiers and might win the war. But it was not easy to decode the secret codes because the Enigma technology was developed such that it kept changing at a particular interval of time. In addition, the Nazis has, with the help of another electronic technology, added some advanced features which requires to look through 153 million million million rotational output in order to decode the input message and thus making it nearly impossible to decipher it.
The day after, 3rd September 1939 – when Britain declared war with Germany, Alan Turing was asked to join the government codes and cipher school and arrived at Bletchley Park. Alan was told to work with other teammates which were present there for the same purpose. Alan Turing was a liner thinker in a typical mathematical fashion, which created resistance for him as well as with his teammates to work smoothly and lead to miscommunication between them. The head of code breaking department was also facing difficulties while dealing with Turing. But Alan had to manage because this was the opportunity for him to do something big apart from serving his country and also it was his dream to make a universal machine which could work on to solve more than one problem at an instant of time. His universal machine was based on his own mathematical model and also he had produced study-papers for that.
Alan Turing suggested that they needed to construct another machine in order to decode the secret messages. The supervisor of his team discarded his proposal because that project required lots of money and it was impossible to get such a huge funding but there was not any another way to decode the messages. So Alan went to the senior of his supervisor and told him about the project. He got the same answer as got from the supervisor. Then Alan wrote a letter to the Prime Minister of Britain who was Winston Churchill at that time and mentioned all his queries and idea of his project. In surprise to everyone, PM Winston Churchill replied to him and wrote in a letter that he would be provided with the required funding to initiate the project and Alan was also made the man in charge of that project.
Alan Turing with help of his teammates designed his own version of BOMBE machine. The bombe machine was originally invented by the poles, but it was unable to effectively decipher the codes as quickly as required. The machine developed by Alan Turing was much better than the polish version of bombe machine, but it also required very very long time to decipher code but still better. Turing had to come up with an idea that could allow the BOMBE machine to crack the code much faster.
On a lucky day, Turing found something which gave a momentum to their project. He identified a weak spot in the nazis encrypted messages.
“Heil Hitler” was the phrase that German put at the end of every encrypted message. Alan found out from this that every letter could be encrypted with the other letter except itself. For an example the letter “A” can be encrypted to the rest of other letters from b to z but cannot be encrypted with itself “A”. This was the required breakthrough Alan got. Only a mathematician can understand how much effort it can reduce!!!
It was the day of 23rd January 1940, when the first operational break for Alan and his teammates came around at Bletchley park when they unraveled the German army administrative key. Once this success took place other teams were able to support turning the deciphered messages into intelligence reports and by the end of 1942 the code breakers were mastering more complex Enigma ciphers.
Once the Enigma machine was cracked, 211 BOMBE machines were built and ran around the clock. They were stationed different locations across Britain, in order to reduce threat of bombings wiping out these highly complex and expensive pieces of kit.
Because of shortage of captured Enigma machines, British ciphers machines called Typex were converted into working Enigma machine. Fully deciphered messages were then translated from German to English before being passes to the British intelligence.
At its peak, the BOMBE was able to help crack 3,000 German messages per day. By the end of the war that amounted to 2.5 million messages, many of which gave the vital information about German positions and strategy. It is estimated that this knowledge played such important roles in key battles that the work of BOMBE and the team at Bletchley Park shortened the war by two years.
Below is a short timeline which shows what happened after his tremendous successful effort.
1943-1945 - Alan Turing was asked by the American government to work as a top level intelligent link with USA. He accepted the invitation and visited to share comprehensive information about cryptography.
1945 - At the end of the world war-2, Alan Turing was awarded the OBE for his excellent and much needed war time service. OBE means Officer of the most excellent Order of the British Empire.
1946 - Alan Turing joined the National Physical Laboratory in teddingto and he published a paper very first time with the detailed design of a stored program computer.
1950 - Alan Turing published “ Computing machinery and Intelligence” in which he developed the Turing test, an attempt to define a standard for a machine to be called as an intelligent.
This was the story of Alan Mathison Turing who was the real hero behind the war. According to Winset Churchill the extraordinary effort of Alan Turing literally shorten the war by 2 to 3 years. His work was so crucial that the British government kept it secret for upcoming 20 years.
There is always a silver bullet and this time it was the great professor, mathematician Alan Turing whose work and idea gave rise to an artificial intelligence and today we call them computers.
