OT: ALAN TURING ACADEMIC PAPERS DISCOVERED

[BigDumbDinosaur]

Most of us probably know something about the brilliant British mathematician Alan Turing.  Among other things, he played a crucial role during World War II in cracking Nazi Germany’s Enigma cyphering system.  That accomplishment made it possible for the British government to, among other things, have detailed knowledge of U-boat movements, ultimately leading to the U-boat threat being nullified.  Turing’s theories on machine processing of numbers, which were the basis on which the “bombe” cypher-breaking machine was developed, are woven into the very fabric of modern computers, giving rise to such terms as “Turing-complete” in describing machine architectures.

In this news article, it is described how Turing’s signed copy of his doctoral dissertation, published in 1938, along with other of his papers from that period, was saved at the last minute from destruction, and is now up for auction.  His documents had been stored in someone’s attic for decades and no one evidently knew they were there until it was decided the attic needed a good cleaning.  Even then, the people who found the papers had no clue about their importance and value, and nearly ended up feeding them to the shredder.

Turing’s PhD dissertation can rightfully be thought of as the foundational document of computer science.  It, along with his other contemporaneous writings, goes into far-reaching theory on machine number processing, clearly defining things that we now take for granted in how computers operate.  One of these papers, “Equivalence of Left and Right Almost Periodicity,” was published while Turing was a doctoral student at Princeton University, and was clearly influenced by the thinking of John von Neumann, who was a lecturer there—von Neumann is cited in the first sentence.

Alan Turing, unfortunately, was a homosexual during a time when such people were criminally prosecuted simply for being homosexual, both in the UK and elsewhere.  When his homosexuality became public knowledge, the British government revoked his security clearance and criminally charged and convicted him.  Denied the opportunity to continue his research activities and enduring continued persecution, Turing apparently ended his own life, dying at age 41, never to see how his brilliance would literally change the world.

[barnacle]

Damn, I wish I had the money...

Neil

[BigEd]

Interesting news!

From another newspaper:

Quote:

The papers include The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis, from 1952. This is described as Turing’s lesser-known masterpiece of mathematical biology, and his last major published work. It has since become a basic model in theoretical biology.

I've found Turing's writings to be extremely clear, and recommend a read of any you can find.

I'm presently reading The Essential Turing (by Jack Copeland, available at the Internet Archive)

The Turing Archive is a good place for more, also Copeland's mini-site at AlanTuring.net.

I recently read the slim Alan Turing volume in the Great Philosophers series - by Hodges, who wrote the excellent and definitive biography. Turing also has an entry in the Stanford online encyclopedia of philosophy.

[BigEd]

Oh another nice Turing fact is the complex design of the £50 note (for me, a rarely seen denomination)
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknot ... pound-note

From that page:

Quote:

Artwork
The design on the reverse of the note celebrates Alan Turing and his pioneering work with computers. It features:

• A mathematical table and formulae from Turing’s seminal 1936 paper “On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. This paper is widely recognised as being foundational for computer science.
  The Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) Pilot Machine which was developed at the National Physical Laboratory as the trial model of Turing’s pioneering ACE design. The ACE was one of the first electronic stored-program digital computers.
  Ticker tape depicting Alan Turing’s birth date (23 June 1912) in binary code.
  Technical drawings for the British Bombe, the machine specified by Turing and one of the primary tools used to break Enigma-enciphered messages during WWII.
  The flower-shaped red foil patch on the back of the note is based on the image of a sunflower head linked to Turing’s morphogenetic (study of patterns in nature) work in later life.
  A series of background images, depicting technical drawings from The ACE Progress Report.

Quote
"This is only a foretaste of what is to come and only the shadow of what is going to be" is a quote from Alan Turing, given in an interview to The Times newspaper on 11 June 1949.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

barnacle wrote:

Damn, I wish I had the money...

Yeah, that would be quite something to have in your computing memorabilia collection.  If I had those papers, I’d mount the dissertation on the wall in my office next to my KIM-1, with an arrow on a sign in between the two, saying “From this came this.”, and the arrow pointing to the KIM.

BigEd wrote:

I've found Turing's writings to be extremely clear, and recommend a read of any you can find.

His writings are very unusual in that respect.  A lot of published work by others at his intelligence level is often dense reading, likely because the intended audience is academics and theoretical scientists, not people such as you and me.  Turing’s work, although presenting complex theory, appears to have been written so a much-wider audience could understand and absorb what is being said.

I will be the first to admit that a lot of Turing’s theory is over my head.  I’m just one of the countless people who have benefited from his work without truly understanding it.

[Yuri]

It is absolutely horrific the way we treated him, especially after how he was instrumental in our victory in defeating Nazi Germany.

The Imitation Game staring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing is a excellent dramatization of events surrounding him.

[vbc]

Yuri wrote:

The Imitation Game staring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing is a excellent dramatization of events surrounding him.

There is also a (probably made for TV) movie with Derek Jacobi as Alan Turing. I watched it a long time ago, but I remember that I liked it better than The Imitation Game. A matter of taste of course, but it was clearly more historically accurate.

[gregorio]

I wonder how long the lie that Turing broke the Enigma will persist in the public sphere?
No, Turing didn't break the Enigma, because that was accomplished by a team of three Polish cryptologists: Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki, and Henryk Zygalski.
Turing's contribution was a machine that allowed decoding faster than the Zygalski sheet method

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanal ... ics_method

[speculatrix]

vbc wrote:

There is also a (probably made for TV) movie with Derek Jacobi as Alan Turing. I watched it a long time ago, but I remember that I liked it better than The Imitation Game. A matter of taste of course, but it was clearly more historically accurate.

That was 'Breaking the Code'. I saw Jacobi do it on the West End stage in 1986.

[gregorio]

“Breaking the Code” is probably the source of all this constant nonsense about Enigma and Turing.

https://youtu.be/qn_BBQEjCxI

If anyone is interested in history, the movie "Enigma Secret " is basically based on historical events.
https://youtu.be/h2Ug4OrtExU

[BigDumbDinosaur]

gregorio wrote:

I wonder how long the lie that Turing broke the Enigma will persist in the public sphere?

No, Turing didn't break the Enigma, because that was accomplished by a team of three Polish cryptologists: Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki, and Henryk Zygalski.

Turing's contribution was a machine that allowed decoding faster than the Zygalski sheet method

No one here said Turing himself broke Enigma.  In my original post, I said...

Quote:

Among other things, he played a crucial role during World War II in cracking Nazi Germany’s Enigma cyphering system.

Please carefully read that and then point out where credit for cracking Enigma was awarded solely to Turing.

The work of Rejewski, Różycki, and Zygalski was seminal, but their methods were not of practical value for large-scale decryption operations.  Also, as the Polish Cipher Bureau’s work progressed, the German military added more rotors to the machine, along with a more complex plugboard, actions that greatly increased the number of encryption possibilities, details of which the Poles did not have.  Even if they had known those details, their manual methods would have yielded too few results to be of value.  That, and the obvious military threat to Poland when Germany withdrew from an earlier non-aggression pact, led to the Poles sharing what they knew with Britain and France (prior to the Vichy government).

Fact is by the time of the start of the Battle of Britain, much what was worked out by Rejewski, Różycki, and Zygalski was obsolete—Enigma had gotten significantly more sophisticated.  Critically, Polish intelligence lacked the technical and financial resources needed to build a code-breaking computer on the scale of what the British and Americans were able to develop.  I recall from a crypto course I took while in the Navy that the Polish Cipher Bureau’s work was deemed by Britain and the USA as initially helpful, but ultimately didn’t significantly reduce the time required to crack messages.  The British had already independently worked out a lot of the details and shared them with the U.S. military, leading to the building of high-speed deciphering computers on both sides of the Atlantic.

BTW, at one time, there was a commercially-available version of Enigma, which supposedly could be purchased by anyone who could afford it.

[gregorio]

Let me quote Gordon Welchman, who became head of Huta 6 at Bletchley Park, who wrote: "Hut 6 Ultra would never have been built if we hadn't learned from the Poles at the last minute details about both the German military version of the commercial Enigma machine and the operational procedures in use at the time." The Polish transfer of theory and technology at Pyry provided a crucial foundation for the subsequent British attempt to decipher the Enigma during World War II at Bletchley Park, where Welchman worked.

I also recommend the book "X, Y & Z: The True Story of Breaking the Enigma" by Dermot Turing (Alan Turing's nephew).

I also recommend the book "The Race To Break The German U-boat Codes, 1939-1943, by David Kahn. 1998"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kahn_(writer)
He emphasizes the fact that the Poles cracked the German ENIGMA code, and that “Poland did what no other country had done–and what the Germans believed impossible.” (p. 67). Kahn recognizes the fact that Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski was the “solver of ENIGMA.” (p. 323). He even calls Rejewski one of the “greatest cryptanalysts of all time”. (p. 66).