The enigma of WWII codebreaker Alan Turing

it is called the Enigma machine the diabolically clever device used by the Nazis to code top secret messages the Enigma machine and the man who broke its code of the subject of a new movie and right now our story from Anthony Mason in 1939 as Nazi troops were invading Poland and threatening Europe British intelligence secretly moved its code-breaking operation to this country estate about an hour outside of London at Bletchley Park the British covertly recruited a team of the country's top cryptographers to try to crack the Germans Enigma code among them a young mathematician named Alan Turing if the Allies broke enigma well sit down into a very short or indeed in the new film the imitation game out next month Benedict Cumberbatch plays the mathematics prodigy who would change the course of the Second World War how old are you mr. Toohey 27 and how old were you when you became a fellow at Cambridge 24 and how old were you when you published this paper for how's the title I can barely understand at 23 and you don't think that qualifies er was a certified prodigy well Newton discovered binomial theorem age 22 Einstein wrote four papers have changed the world by the age of 26 and as far as I can tell I fir I've barely made par that must be sort of intimidating to try to have to put all of that on the screen hell yeah it is to understand Turing's work Cumberbatch familiarized himself with the Germans encryption device called the Enigma machine on display at London's Imperial War Museum this is what Alan Turing was warring against this is exactly this is the enemy the crooked hand of death is his code in the film mmm Turing dude this is kind of a mathematical problem didn't he yeah absolutely I mean he really did um but you also understood that to beat a machine you had to use a machine rather than humans because there just wasn't enough time I I like solving problems commander and enigma is the most difficult problem in the world no enigma isn't difficult is impossible the Americans the Russians the French the Germans everyone thinks enigma is unbreakable good let me try and we'll know for sure when tree what was happening here was top secret absolutely top secret and in fact everybody who worked here kept the secret for thirty years after the war at Bletchley Park archivist Victoria war poll says the code breaking operation was headquartered in hut 8 and this is where Island cheering Patty's office Turing and his team work with captured German machines the Nazis set their codes on the enigmas alphabetic keyboard and each time you press it the light lights up and tells you what to write down as your ciphertext the code was reset every day so the cryptographers had only 24 hours to crack it the odds one in 159 million million million this was Turing's concept Dorian came up with a concept originally yes he conceived a massive machine that would mathematically eliminate potential codes engineer Tony Jarvis you've got a column of three vertical the drums actually replicate one Enigma machine right and so each what you've got actually 36 enigmas all looking for an answer this machine still works it does it's the only working one in the world you want to see it running I'd love to see it right absolutely it took nine months for touring and his team to design and build a prototype at that moment in the film actually gave me goosebumps to think what that must mean like the first time it worked and then stopped to give the settings for the day I mean it just has literally stood on the back of my neck as it must have been for them and that is a Eureka moment cracking the cipher allowed British intelligence to decode messages to German u-boats that had prayed on Allied shipping it's estimated Turing's work shortened the war by two years saving millions of lives I mean when you think about what he was doing back in the 1940s how remarkable was it stunning Jim Hendler professor of computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has taught a course on touring he revolutionized cryptography the modern field of computer science the subfield of artificial intelligence a lot of the math of those things goes right back to Turing and he did it all essentially in anonymity he did it very much in anonymity because during the war time he was working under under secrecy was the family at all aware of what he was doing here for the first part of the war the family didn't know him where he was based Sir John Dermot Turing is Alan Turing's nephew all those things are completely unknown until the mid 70s even you didn't know what he'd been don't know we crowded around this small black and white TV set that we had at home in the 70s to find out when the BBC put out a little programme on it that's how we found out but by then the man who created the blueprint for the modern computer had already taken his own life after the war Turing had become a world-class marathon runner he moved to the University of Manchester to do research but in January 1952 he was arrested and charged with gross indecency for having sexual relations with another man however I mean when he was prosecuted then he was not in denial about it he wasn't he tried to hide it he didn't try to hi at all Turing was sentenced to probation and required to undergo estrogen treatments then believed to suppress homosexual desires I say it could have been worse but I still think what happened to him was pretty awful in 1954 Turing died after eating an apple dipped in cyanide he was 41 it would take nearly 60 years for his reputation to be fully rehabilitated only last year he was finally pardoned by Queen Elizabeth today at Bletchley Park now a museum Alan Turing is celebrated for what he was a war hero with a story like something out of a movie I'm designing machine that will allow us to drink every message every day instantly it was an epic life a really epic life a two short epic life 41 years of it we you know we owed him we owed him at least double that I'd say

Channel: CBS Sunday Morning

Views: 289,767

Keywords: alan, turing, wwii, world, war, two, benedict, cumberbatch, enigma, video, cbs, news

Id: nEomYB94TTI

Length: 7min 30sec (450 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 26 2014