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Alan Turing's Notes Found After Being Used As Insulation At Bletchley Park
An anonymous reader writes: In 2013, a restoration project for Hut 6 of Bletchley Park uncovered a collection of papers being used as roof insulation. The papers were frozen to preserve them while they were inspected and repaired. Now they're on display at an exhibition showing items found during the restoration process. "The documents also included the only known examples of Banbury sheets, a technique devised by [Turing] to accelerate the process of decrypting Nazi messages. No other examples have ever been found. All the findings are unique as all documentary evidence from the codebreaking process was supposed to be destroyed under wartime security rules."
First they persecute him for being gay, then they assassinate him, and finally they use his notes as insulation.
Those British pommy bastards are pure evil, and they deserve to have their rotten Empire collapse around their ears.
Yes but are the notes Turing Complete?
We get The Imitation Game 2?
Imagine being the guy that had to sift through the freshly dug up latrine behind Hut 6. Just to make sure nothing important was used during someone's morning constitutional.
His actions saved the documents from certain destruction. Punch something else.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
You're mad that someone's action saved the documents from being destroyed? Did you forget to read the last sentence of the summary?
All the findings are unique as all documentary evidence from the codebreaking process was supposed to be destroyed under wartime security rules.
Using the work of a luminary like Alan Turing is such a way is insulating!
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
In the UK "fanny" is an obscene term for a woman's genitals, so given the context you're using the wrong term and making yourself look stupid. That aside, do you have as much of a problem with heterosexual arse piracy, or is it only gays that you hate? What about pegging? Are you sure you're not in the closet?
It was mostly just scribbling, and notes taken during decription. They had reams of the stuff that was no longer useful. This seems like mostly routine day-to-day stuff that would have been seen as having zero value a couple of days later. Probably installed while Hut 6 was actually active. They had heaps of papers that had no actual use other than insulation material.
Other than the obvious impact Turing's work had in the war effort, did people at Bletchley have any idea how valuable his work would be more generally? My computer science peers are quite good at explaining how their work might have value and impact. Indeed, a lot of scientists these days start publications by providing this context. But is the same true in the first half of the twentieth century and in the middle of a world war? It might well have been the case that his notes were genuinely believed to have more value as insulation.
The notes will be restored and then popped into a glass display case with one or two pages visible, with a sort-of description of why they are important.
Pretty much all of Bletchley is like this, unfortunately. Stuff on display that you are not going to understand, such as copies of Turing's early mathematical papers with only the first page showing.
The problem with the whole Bletchley Park experience is that it was obviously extremely important, but is practically beyond all explanation for the ordinary punter. I think I might be able to intellectually struggle through an explanation of some of it, but the displays do not explain it in enough detail to help with that. Overall, my visit felt like a patchwork of different explanations of the same few concepts using poster boards, audio devices and video and interactive displays. It's padded out with various "wartime experience" bits here and there.
It probably seems like a very negative attitude, but a technical chap in his mid-forties with a couple of bright teenagers in tow ought to be right in the target demographic for Bletchley, but I'm practically embarrassed to say that I ended up drinking weak hot chocolate in the cafe and agreeing with my boys that it was all rather dull.
Special commendation for the rack of old bicycles at the end of one of the huts, with a hidden speaker to give you the authentic experience of what squeaky bicycle wheels sounded like in the 1940's. Or something?
Pretty much any country in the world would have treated Turing the same in that era. Most of the world still would. The Brits have no special shame in that category, and they have been doing their level best to set things right. Many other countries still have yet to catch up, not just legally, but culturally.
"fanny" in the UK is a term for a woman's genitals, but it is not obscene!
Yet he did more to save their asses than ALL of the RAF.
I hope all you brits are still ashamed of yourselves.
As opposed to forcibly enslaving millions of people around the world through several centuries of colonial rule? If you're going to lay a guilt trip on Britain, what about the US with it's legacy of slavery? And good heavens, look at the evils perpetrated in communist Russia, or Germany and Japan during the war years. Look, every country has their black marks, and some are pretty damn black indeed. If you're going to collectively assign guilt to future generations, it will never end. Ever. Future generations will also look at us and sadly shake their heads, I'm sure. We learn from the past, we forgive, we try to make things right as best we can, and we move on.
The British government has offered an official apology for their treatment of him and pardoned him, and I'm not sure how much more he can be honored and appreciated he can be at this point, not just by the Brits, but by everyone who knows how much he accomplished. See my sig.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Visited the National Cryptologic Museum (on the same campus as the NSA, just off 295 in Maryland) about a decade ago. I and my then-girlfriend were probably the only visitors in the entire building, and the staff were pretty excited to see us. They even let us try out the German Enigma machine they had on display - no glass display case at that time! Don't know if it's changed in the last ten years, though.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Tommy Flowers, .... was a British engineer. During World War II, Flowers designed Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer, to help solve encrypted German messages.
Funny, I was going to mention Tommy Flowers in a post above. I find it a bit odd that people today have focussed on Turing as the hero of that time; I cannot help wondering if it's because of the gay angle. As you say, Flowers built the first computer than can be called modern - electronic, programmable, general purpose. Yet hardly anyone has ever heard of him.
At the time Bletchley Park seemed to be divided into two "camps" and Flowers was up against some influential opponents. One described Colossus as "a waste of good valves".
Flowers even put some of his own money into building the first Colossus (there were several), for which he was never fully re-imbursed, although after the war he did get a small award. What a far cry from the billions made by Jobs, Wang, Gates & co two generations later. Churchill's order to destroy the Bletchley Park paperwork and hardware left a near vacuum in the history of computing - there are many people today who even think Bill Gates invented computers, FFS.
Absolutely no disrespect to Mr Flowers:
The computer was the tool.
The code was cracked not by tools alone, but by mathematical insight, luck, sloppiness on the other side and a number of factors.
So while Flowers was undoubtedly the engineer that could build the machine to automate the calculations that were being done, the actual calculations and WHY they worked were the part of Turing and others. And in the process he added a whole new branch to the mathematics of the time (which we now call Computer Science).
Turing dreamed it, Flowers built it, but it's hard to imagine the machine being much use without the maths - the code was broken by complicated mathematical analysis of the mistakes made, basically, and was brought into the realm of the feasible by mathematical shortcuts and spotting of dead-ends. However, the maths could be applied - albeit slowly - to the code even without computers.
Turing made it theoretically possible. Flowers made it practically possible - by building the machine that actual tried to do it, and did it fast enough to be useful.
Both deserve respect.