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Alan Turing – The Delilah Project (bonhams.com)
60 points by belter on Jan 4, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 7 comments


I'd like to see TLDR of this.


The popular film portrail is that Alan cracked the Enigma alone. Alan did contribute, particularly to cracking the harder naval variant of the Enigma, but there were other notable contributors who get less limelight such as Gordon Welchman.

By mid-war Turing is sent to America and then put to work on a secure telephone system called Delilah at another government site. No real hurry, no big resources. At first he's alone, then eventually he's assigned a (brilliant) student as a helper.

Meanwhile, at Bletchley, others are building the Colossus computer to crack another German cipher.

They are building what many credit as the first computer, and Turing will have influenced that heavily, but he's basically not leading that effort.

So from mid-war onwards it's basically Turing shut away in a shed where he won't distract people too much. It's almost like Turing was hard to work with!? :D


> It's almost like Turing was hard to work with!? :D

Maybe there were other reasons why he was sidelined and (eventually) driven to suicide. Guess we'll just never know...


Not looking to accuse the commenter of anything, but...

I think the Imitation Game movie may have given some folks a rather simplistic notion of Turing (indeed, I was under such an illusion until I read the biography on which the movie is supposedly based): that he was a tortured genius singly vital to the war effort, who was then persecuted and who then as a result committed suicide. But his real story is more complicated (though, to be clear, I am not looking to downplay how society treated him).

Turing's purposefulness didn't end after Bletchley or his conviction. Up until the end, he was doing ground-breaking work (at least as far as I understand it) in mathematical biology.


Thanks.


[flagged]


Don't pollute


Parent comment asked for a tldr




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