Alan Turing lived a life shrouded in secrecy. His work on the German Enigma code, which Winston Churchill called "the greatest contribution to the war effort", remained subject to the Official Secrets Act long after his death. For a long time, his homosexuality considerably downplayed his role as the father of computing. Despite all this, today he is known as one of the most famous cryptographers in history, a position largely deserved by his achievements. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayAlan Turing was born on June 23, 1912. When he was only a year old, his mother, to join his father in India, left him and his elder brother with a retired army colonel and his wife. Turing went to a public boarding school. It was there that his scientific curiosity and romantic nature began to take shape. His unsupervised chemical experiments, his unconventional approach to mathematics and his poor grades in English prompted the headmaster to write, in a letter to his parents: "If he is to remain in England, a public school, he must aim to educate. If he is only going to be a scientific specialist, he is wasting his time in public school. His schooling was not completely wasted, however, as he fell in unrequited love with a student a few grades above him, Christopher Morcom. They became friends and briefly collaborated on scientific experiments, but their relationship ended when Morcom died suddenly in February 1930. Despite his poor grades, Turing won a mathematics scholarship to King's College, Cambridge. His career at King's was much more successful than at boarding school. In 1935, at the age of 22, he was elected a Fellow of King's for a thesis in which he proved the central limit theorem, although it had already been proven in 1922 by Jarl Lindeberg. In 1936, Turing left England for Princeton University, where he made his first major contribution to computing. One of the greatest mathematical challenges of the time was the Entscheidungs ​​problem. The problem of Entscheidungs, in short, is the question of whether there is a definite method that can be applied to a preposition to decide whether a preposition is provable. The main problem was that the question, to be answered requiring a concrete definition of the method, contained both philosophical and mathematical elements. In late 1936, Turing published his paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Problem of Entscheidungs". This article turned out to be crucial not for mathematics, but for computer science. First, Turing replaced the arithmetic basis of the Entscheidungs ​​problem and the various proposed solutions with simple, hypothetical devices that would later become known as Turing machines. He established that these machines would be able to perform any mathematical calculation as long as it was in an algorithm. He then proved that there is no solution to the Entscheidungs ​​problem, because it is not possible to decide algorithmically whether a Turing machine will ever stop. In one fell swoop, Turing had established the mechanical computability of everything that was computable and created the concept of the modern computer. Turing, on his return to Cambridge in 1938, began working part-time at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS). He was particularly interested in the German Enigma code. Poland had developed Bomba, capable of deciphering Enigma, but relied on an indicator procedure that the Germans were likely to modify, as they did in May 1940. Turing sought a less dangerous procedure. and hehad produced a theoretical specification of the 'bomb' before it even arrived at Bletchley Park in 1939. The bomb was a machine which determined which sockets of the Enigma machine were connected to which other sockets on the day in question and what the wheel was working on . the order inside the machine was. Turing couldn't design a machine that did this directly, because there were too many potential configurations of the sockets and wheels. Instead, he designed the bomb so that, through a series of logical deductions, it excluded as many power socket connections and wheel orders as possible, leaving only a few to try to find out manually. If any of these deductions were impossible, the bomb would test another set of hypotheses, and then another, and so on, until it found a set of hypotheses that did not produce impossible results. These possible hypotheses were relatively few, so cryptographers would test them manually on a replica of Enigma to see which one was correct. The first bomb, installed at Bletchley Park on March 18, 1940, was a failure. The bomb, powerful in theory, only worked in practice if cryptographers identified words, or “cradles,” that the bomb could then use to crack the code. Turing's original machine required much longer cradles than cryptographers could imagine. The answer to this problem came from fellow codebreaker Gordon Welchman. Welchman realized that the original Turing bomb had only made one deduction based on the given scenario before moving on to the next one. So the bomb could easily take a wrong turn and start the series of deductions again. Welchman proposed that the bomb could be adapted to take into account other possibilities, thereby eliminating the need to start from scratch each time it reached a dead end. Although Turing was initially skeptical of the changes, he quickly accepted them. He also added a modification of his own: “simultaneous scanning”. The original bomb required cryptographers to test one supposed power outlet at a time. A simultaneous scan allowed cryptographers to see if a plug was connected to another outlet. Armed with these modifications, the next attempt to create a bomb was crowned with success. Despite being Bletchley Park's most successful codebreaker and leader of Hut 8, Turing was not popular among his comrades. He had a reputation for being eccentric and some have suggested that he would have been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome if he had been examined today. His only interest in researching the Naval Enigma code, in his own words, was "because no one else was doing anything about it and I could have it all to myself." He ran long distances up to 40 miles because it "gave him time to think" and rode to work on a broken bicycle while wearing a gas mask. He chained his teacup to a radiator with a padlock. As for his personality, he was a loner who refused to make eye contact with anyone and walked away from anyone who tried to initiate a conversation, especially women. He once told one of his colleagues that he hated spending time with women because "they open their mouths and say such trivial things, it's like a frog has come out of it." » The only significant relationship he ever had with a woman was in 1941, when he became engaged to Joan Clarke, one of the smartest cryptographers at Bletchley Park and his good friend. He called off the engagement a few months later, shortly after telling Clarke he was 1950.