Alan Turing's Bombe: The foundation of all modern computers | Enigma Code | The Imitation Game.

Alan Mathison Turing was an English mathematician and computer scientist. During world war second, he worked for the Government Code and Cypher School, Britain's codebreaking center that produced Ultra intelligence. At that time, German field agents extensively used the Enigma machine to encrypt and decrypt the codes to protect commercial, diplomatic, and military communications. Turing along with his coworkers designed a machine that is basically a mathematical model of computation describing an abstract machine. This machine manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules. He also devised a number of techniques and an electromechanical machine called Bombe that could break the German enigma code more effectively than the Polish bomba method. It is estimated that Turing accomplishments saved around 14 million lives during world war II so basically, he is a war hero.

In 1950 he published a paper called "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." he envisioned that computers would become so powerful that they would think. He devised the Turing test: a judge asks questions to two entities, one person and the other a computer. The judge decides which one is human and which is a computer based on the answers given. If the judge is wrong then the computer has passed the test and can be considered intelligent. This procedure forms a basis for Artificial Intelligence, however, Turing's vision of AI has not yet been achieved.

In 1952 Turing was prosecuted for gross indecency, as being gay was then a crime in Britain. He was sentenced to chemical castration. It is believed that this caused depression and in 1954 Turing committed suicide by eating an apple poisoned with cyanide.

Alan Turing: The Enigma is a biography of Alan Turing by Andrew Hodges. This book covers Alan Turing's life and work. The film The Imitation Game (2014) is loosely based on this book where actor Benedict Cumberbatch plays the role of Alan Turing. This film deserves credit for pointing viewers in the direction of such a compelling individual and historical drama.