Many people think that the first working computer was built by an American team. But in fact, the world's first programmable digital computer was built in secret by the British during the Second World War at Bletchley Park. Bletchley is famous as the place where the Enigma machine was broken which was done by using a machine called BOMBE.
ABOUT ENIGMA
The enigma was a German piece of engineering that was used by the Germans to send secure, encrypted messages amongst each other during World War I.
In enigma, you have to get a number of settings of the machine, or else the code cannot be cracked. The Enigma Code seems ‘uncrackable’ due to the fact that you would have to go through more than almost 15 million million million possibilities to arrive at the correctly deciphered code!
This seemingly 'uncrackable' Enigma was cracked by British mathematician and computer scientist ALAN TURING who is also known as the "FATHER OF MODERN COMPUTING".
Turing designed an electromechanical machine, called the Bombe, that searched through the permutations, and by the end of the war, the British were able to read all daily German Naval Enigma traffic. According to some historians, Turing’s work at Bletchley helped to shorten the war in Europe by as many as two to four years.
MODERN COMPUTING & AI
With the end of World War II, turing starts to turn his sight into artificial intelligence.
Alan Turing conceptualizes the idea of modern computers calling them universal Turing machine.
The Turing machine consists of a limitless memory that could take any set of instructions (an algorithm), and carry out a mechanical process to calculate it. This machine didn’t just solve one algorithm; it could solve all of them. It was the "One Machine" for all calculable problems. Computer as we know it today.
In 1936, Turing published a paper that is now recognized as the foundation of computer science.
He analysed how human beings tend to follow a definite method or procedure to perform a given task. From here he came up with the idea of a machine that could decode and perform any set of instructions and called it as "UNIVERSAL MACHINE".
In 1950 Turing publishes the paper “Computer Machinery and Intelligence” in which he interpreted the idea of artificial intelligence and he also put forward a test to determine how far AI has advanced, popularly known as Turing test. This test is still used today. According to the Turing test, if a computer can fool a human observer in thinking it's a human then we can say that it can truly think. Some reports claim that this test was passed by a computer program called Eugene Goostman in 2014. However, some artificial experts are contesting the victory, and we’re still left waiting for a more capable contender.
In modern days, AI took about 12 min 50 sec to break the enigma code, where it was using about 2,000 servers for doing calculations.
In 1954, Alan Turing committed suicide at the age of 41.
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