Alan Turing

I’m not sure how many people know the name Alan Turing or what he achieved. I guess many people don’t know much about his history and I’m pretty sure any of you out there that are aware of Mr Turing and his importance to the world you must be scratching your head as to why he may be appearing on a conspiracy blog?

Now what I am going to say is not what those of you who DO know about Alan are thinking. This is not a blog to reveal his secret mission to decode the Enigma machine. This is actually a blog revealing the importance, (and coincidence) of Adolf Hitler and his connection to Alan Turing.

Yes, the importance of little Adolf and how without him I wouldn’t be writing this blog. You, yes you, also wouldn’t be reading this blog and a billion internet cafe’s and coffee shops full of froth wouldn’t exist……..without little Adolf. (After Co’phoney’virus they probably wont exist anymore anyway)! but that’s beside the point.

Now I know he’s not the most popular man, and he did allegedly do some shitty things to many people. But what he also did was inadvertently create the situation that would propel mankind to a new level of intelligence. He moved the game on to the next level for the human race.

“WHAT?!!” “This is an OUTRAGE!” “What the hell is this MORON blogging about??” “Shut him up, he’s an idiot!!!” “What has this got to do with Alan Turing?”

Yeah, I can hear you. I agree it sounds a little crazy so far. But let me take you back to 1941. Hang on, scrap that. Let me take you back to 1889 and on the 20th April a boy was born. He was named, Adolf.

Baby Hitler. Who would have thought??

Then, some 23 years later another boy was born. He was named Alan.

What these two men created would change the world forever and they could never have done it without each other. This is where the conspiracy of this story lies. Like so many events, inventions, decisions regarding the history of mankind there seems to always lie some coincidence at the heart of the action that without it, we would never have developed the next level of intelligence as we strive to better ourselves as a race. (I could have said evolved, but I’m still on the fence with that theory).

So, Hitler. Well just in case you don’t know who he is this is the official line. Basically he was a crazy evil fuckhead who built his own army, overthrew the German government, killed a shit load of people and started a fight on the rest of the world. This is better known as world war two which frankly went tits up for the German (Austrian), so whilst he pondered his options inside a bunker he decided the best escape was suicide. His missus and his dog, who were hanging around the bunker both took cyanide capsules to die. Hitler also took a cyanide capsule but also shot himself in the head, allegedly. Then the Russians turned up and burned the bodies outside beyond recognition.

This is pretty much the official story and you shouldn’t believe any rumours that he escaped to South America with the help of the yanks. Wink Wink!

Alan Turing didn’t grow up to be a killing machine and as far as we know never had any intentions whatsoever to start a fight on the entire population although, he may have provoked other people to want to start a fight with him. Bit of a difficult character apparently.

Turing was born in London. His parents had moved there whilst his father was on leave from the ICS (Indian Civil Service). His father was still active with the ICS when Alan was young and his parents would often leave him and his older brother behind when they travelled between the UK and India. Not on their own obviously, they palmed them off to some family friends or something. Doesn’t matter. No one cares, your’e just waiting for the Hitler bits.

Anyway, Alan was getting noticed at school from around age six as being a bit bloody clever. At thirteen in public school it was obvious he was going to learn things his own way and by sixteen he had not only discovered the works of Einstein, but grasped the very idea’s of what Einstein was thinking including the work Einstein had done opposing some of Newtons laws regarding motion. Alan Turing was without doubt a brilliant mathematician and a genius.

In 1931 Turing attended Kings College, Cambridge where he achieved first class honours in mathematics and went on to publishing papers on the computing of numbers. His paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” would be published and Alan had started to really make a name for himself with his ideologies surrounding machines and their computational abilities.

This is a simple Turing Machine.

The Turing Machine is a model of mathematical computation which defines a machine. It basically simulates the construction of a computers algorithm using the logic of the algorithm source.

Now this might not mean anything to you but what this meant was, Alan Turings theory could potentially understand how a computer is thinking and what it will do next. During world war two, this idea was used as a code breaker. An “ENIGMA” code breaker to be exact.

This is an Enigma machine. During WW2 NAZI Germany would send messages to it’s fleet of ships with coordinates for their next attack. All the messages were coded and tapped out on one of these machines with another machine aboard a ship receiving the coded instructions.

For the messages to be decrypted both operators, (the sender and receiver) had to know two sets of codes. A daily base code which was changed every 24 hours, and an operators individual setting used for that message. This would allow both operators to start with their machines in the same position settings and follow a set of rules to send and receive the required message. Often this individual setting would be repeated as usually something memorable to that person would be chosen. A bit like the passwords you have to come up with today.

Due to this and the complex typing system there were more than 158 quintillion settings, or codes. That’s billions and billions of possible coded messages that had to be cracked within 24 hours before the pattern is reset and you had to start from scratch. Again! Every Day!

The coded messages themselves were easily captured during German radio transmissions. This information was of no use if you didn’t have an Enigma machine and had no knowledge of the starting state of the machine each day. It’s like trying to beat a Grand Master at chess when you don’t know the rules of the game! And he’s shooting at you, and bombing your mates, and eating all the free biscuits you get at those chess meets, possibly. I don’t know if the biscuit thing is true actually. I imagine crumbs on a chess board would send those guys crazy. I bet Hitler played chess with a biscuit eater!

Where was I? Oh, yes, Alan.

What Turing built at Bletchley Park, was a machine to simulate what the Enigma machines were saying to each other using the Enigma’s algorithm. All they needed to know was the starting state and Turings machine, or “computer”, would decipher the message. The “Bombe” would simulate the Enigma.

This was the home of the code breakers during the war. Amongst many military staff were a team including Alan Turing working day and night attempting to crack the Enigma’s codes. This would give the “Allies” a distinct advantage in the fight against Hitler.

Now an earlier version of the Enigma machine had already been cracked by three Polish mathematicians and code breakers. A replica of this earlier version had been built and some codes were cracked with the help of French intelligence supplying intercepted messages.

The newer machines Turing and his team worked on were more complex with many more computations. This is where Turing’s technique called “Banburismus” would help process and break the coded messages.

In 1941 the team in “HUT 8” at Bletchley Park had cracked The Enigma coded messages using Turing’s Bombe and it is reported that this information when used by British intelligence shortened the war by at least two years and saved millions of lives.

The work that these code breakers did was top level secret stuff and it wasn’t until the 1990’s that the full extent of what had been achieved, and the team achieving it were revealed. The decoded messages were only used to stop selected attacks. This was so the Germans didn’t catch on that the Enigma had been cracked as they would have changed the machine and a new simulation machine would have to be built taking months maybe even years.

Right, that’s enough background. If you want to know all the details look it up. The reason for this blog is about conspiracy and the conspiracy here is coincidence, and I don’t believe in coincidences.

Alan Turing is known by many as “The Father of Computers!” He wasn’t the first to suggest computer science, that was possibly Charles Babbage in the early 1800’s, but what Turing did was to take many idea’s and adapt them to his own studies and works. Alan Turing took things to the next level though, he actually built a machine that computed actual problems and gave useful results and correct results. Code breaking is solving a puzzle and Alan’s machine did this, it solved the puzzle where humans had failed.

But would he have done this without Hitler? I don’t think so, or at least not in such a short time frame. There was a desperation by the Allies to stop Hitler as soon as possible before he overpowered to the point he couldn’t be stopped. Had it not been for the sheer devastating brutality that Hitler was inflicting on people then the overwhelming need to stop him immediately would not have been there. Turing worked on his idea harder and more intense than he ever had, due to the importance of restricted time to get it to work.

But what if Alan Turing wasn’t born when he was, or where he was. What if Turing hadn’t attended the schools he did. Is it a coincidence that what seems like the only person who could stop Hitlers advanced attacks just happens to be a genius mathematician who loves solving puzzles and wanted to build a computer. A computer that everyone said wouldn’t work and that Turing was crazy. I don’t believe in coincidences and the fact that the only person to crack Enigma just happens to be in the right place at the right time is just strange. It’s almost like the script was written by an entity that already knows the future of our fate.

I’m not saying Alan Turing won the war single handedly but taking out Enigma allowed the war to go in a different direction. This then had a knock on effect with other missions. A war is won with many pieces and they all play an important role. But the only person on the planet, from what I can find, who was in just the right position to invent a frigging computer at a time where we needed someone to invent a frigging computer…………was Alan Turing.

This is not a one off coincidence either, there are many through history and historical events. They change the course of events to the point you ask yourself, “But what if he or she hadn’t of done that odd thing that day?”

We think coincidences are by chance, that something unusual has happened more than once or that without 1 and 2 you can’t have 3. Like it’s a random occurrence that you just go “Shit, what a coincidence” to and shrug it off as nothing more than just that, life’s a bit funny.

Bullshit, I’m not having it. I will do more on “Coincidence” and how’s there no way this shit can keep happening. Surely by definition, the fact that there’s so many on such an important scale prevents them to be a coincidence in the first place. Isn’t it supposed to be a rare or unusual situation. How can these things be a coincidence, if it keeps fucking happening???

Thing is though, without Hitler it would seem, the need to build Turing’s computer wouldn’t have been there. We can only “Assume” that Alan Turing would have still created the machines that would lead to the modern day computers we know. But we don’t need to assume that the situation definitely put these two guys together to come up with the very early computers, pretty good computers at that.

Oohh, nearly forgot. Check out the Turing Test. It’s basically a test to determine whether you are speaking to a robot or not. It was originally called the “Imitation Game” which is also the name of a 2014 film about Alan Turing. There’s many versions of Turing Tests if you Google it. One of the great things is this test is real usage of Artificial Intelligence, that’s right, this guy was championing “AI” in the 1940’s!!!

Alan Turing died in 1954 after taking his own life, allegedly! As a homosexual in 1950’s Britain it was considered a criminal offence and he was given the choice of prison time, or take a course of hormone altering based prescribed drugs that would eventually leave him as a castrated male.

That’s how we salute our war heroes, well done Britain!!