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Alan Turing's Accomplishments

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In history, numerous innocent people died due to atrocities. World War II is an historical event that can be considered as one of the most awful, deplorable, and destructive. Soldiers, mothers, fathers, adults, and children died. World War II resulted in the deaths of approximately 60 million people (Dan). Many nations, and groups mobilized together in order to fight back against the Nazis, including the scientific community. When United Kingdom declared war on Germany, Alan Turing and his team worked together to break the code of the Enigma machine and thus have access to the German military communication (Lendl). This essay is about Alan Turing’s accomplishments. In order to clearly explain his accomplishments, in this essay I will focus …show more content…

“the keyboard for inputting letters, the scrambler unit for encrypting the letters and the lamp board for displaying the enciphered letters” (Lendl). In order to break the Enigma Machine, the code breakers had to find the daily settings that the German used and understand them. However, it is important to know that Polish cryptographers already broke the Enigma machine in 1932 as Marian Rejewski reconstructed a replica of the Enigma i.e. Bomba machine. However, Turing used Rejewski’s ideas and improved the bombe machine so that the machine could go through all the possible combinations of the Enigma rapidly (Lendl). The polish Bomba inspired Alan Turing for the construction of his own Bombe machine. The Bombe machine was crucial for the breaking of Enigma’s signals. This machine is not considered as a computer and does not perform calculation, but was designed “to carry out a systematic search to determine the following components of an Enigma key: the rotor order, the ‘rotor core starting positions’, and some of the ‘steckers’” (Carter). Due to the work of the Bletchley Park codebreakers, the United Kingdom had access to the German communications and could predict future naval attacks, this allowed the prevention of several

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