ALAN TURING: Enigma, computer and poisonned apple.

Alan Turing was born in 1912 and died in 1954, aged 41. In the meantime, he invented
the computer and he won the Second World War... well, basically!

When he was a kid, Alan Turing was a rather excellent, diligent, interested student.
Moreover, his diligence will be talked about in the newspapers when, at the age of 13, in
1926, when there is a national strike on the first day of school, he goes to school by
bicycle 90 km away. He will even take a hotel for the night...

In 1927, he befriended Christopher Morcom who, like him, was passionate about
mathematics and whom Turing held in great esteem. Suddenly, when Morcom died in
1930 of bovine tuberculosis, Turing considered it his duty to accomplish what his friend
Christopher should have accomplished throughout his life as a mathematician.

Turing will seek to generalize the decision problem which is linked to Gödel's work on
incompleteness. To put it simply, the decision problem is determining whether a theorem
can be validated by a procedure that is mechanical and automatic, that is to say... by an
algorithm!

An algorithm is a succession of perfectly clear instructions to be executed to solve a

given problem. For example, in a cooking recipe, if you are told: “separate the whites
from the yolks, add the yolks, stir.” It's an algorithm. When you are told: ''add a schlouk
of sugar'', it's not an algorithm, it's not clear, it's shit!

Turing will develop a model of an abstract machine that can also be seen as a very very
very docile human, capable of executing these following instructions:

We imagine a ribbon which contains as many boxes as we wish and in each box, either
there is nothing, or there is a given symbol (which can be a number, a letter, etc.). So
there, we are in the initial state and the machine, what it does, is that it observes one box
and only one box at a time, the first being the initial box. It will then execute the
instructions corresponding to the state indicated in each box, one after the other. For
example, an instruction can be like this: if we are in state 54 and the symbol we see is 1,
then the symbol becomes 0 and we move to the right and go to state 92. A simple
example is to have a machine that will simply increment the numbers, i.e. add 1 each
time.

So, we are going to have state 0 which consists in saying that if the square is not empty,
we go to the right and we stay in state 0 and if the square is empty, we shift from one
square to left and we go to state 1. In state 1, if the number in the box is less than 9, we
add 1 and we shift to the left and we go to state 2. If the number is 9, so it goes to 0 and
we move one box to the left, but we stay in state 1. And if the box is empty, we put the
number 1 there and we stop, ended. Finally, state 2: if the square is not empty, we shift
to the left, we stay in state 2 and if the square is empty, we stop. This machine, called the
Turing machine, constitutes the basis of what a computer is. The instructions are the
program and the ribbon is the memory.

Just before World War II, Turing was recruited by a secret government center
specializing in cryptography. He must participate in deciphering the German machine
Enigma, deemed unbreakable. So, Enigma is an encryption machine, that is to say, it
transforms a message into another message which is readable by changing each letter
into another letter. So, this number, we call it a substitution number, and it therefore
consists of changing each letter into another letter and classically, when you change a
letter for another letter, it's always the same. For example, if the J becomes a W, then all
the Js will become Ws, which means that in general it is relatively easy to decrypt a
message because we know that in such language, such and such a letter is more often
used than another and therefore, the longer the message, the more statistics will tell us
which letters are used. But not with Enigma, no…

Regarding the actual operation of Enigma: we have 3 rotors with 26 positions which are
electrically wired and which are nested, a bit like an odometer. That is to say that there is
the one on the right which turns, then when it has made a complete turn, it turns the one
in the middle by one notch and when the one in the middle has made a complete turn, it
makes turn the left one. In addition, we have a manual wiring that allows to exchange 10
pairs of letters on the front, which means that out of the 26 letters of the alphabet, we
have 6 which remain as they are and therefore, with each letter which is typed , we have
the rotors that will move, which means that the output letter will be different each time.
So, if we type the same letter 20 times in a row, we have 20 different letters. So... it
sucks! So far, it's pretty ingenious, but nothing spectacular. The thing that's really crazy
is the combinatorial complexity that there can be in terms of the possibilities that we
have at the initial setting.

What you need to know is that the 3 rotors, which are completely removable, are chosen
from 5 possible rotors. So, for the first rotor, we have a choice among 5, for the second
rotor, we have a choice among the 4 remaining and for the third rotor, we have a choice
among the 3 remaining. This means that we have 60 possibilities to simply position the
rotors! In addition, each rotor has 26 possible positions. This means that there are 26
possibilities for the first, 26 for the second and 26 for the third. That's a total of 17,576
possibilities for the position of the rotors, once you've selected the rotors. So... rotors +
positions, we already have 1,054,560 possibilities. And all that is absolutely nothing
compared to the wiring that can be done on the front with the 10 pairs of letters...
Because there, it's just insane! The possibilities are: (26! / 6!10!2^10), which gives us
150,738,274,937,250 possibilities. So, altogether (rotors, the position of the rotors and
wiring), that gives us: 158,962,555,217,826,360,000 possibilities. So, it is almost
impossible, humanly, to decipher such a machine, without knowing the setting in
advance... Setting that changes every day at midnight! It's the Germans, they have a
sheet like that, on which they are told: here, if the position of the day is 143, they go to
line 143 and it is written ''you are using rotors 2-4-5, you put such wiring'' and voila,
moving on!

Turing therefore decides to create a machine that can test all the possibilities, in order to
decrypt the message. This machine will be called the BOMB machine. But let's be clear:
even if we test 1000 settings per second, it still takes 5 billion years to test all the
possibilities, so... it's far! Suddenly, the game will consist of trying to reduce the
possibilities as much as possible, so as not to drag yourself around 150 billion billion
possibilities, but to have something a little more playable, because at the moment, it's
just not possible.

So, there are two things that will come into play: the first is an obvious defect of the
Enigma machine and the second is a weakness in terms of security among the Germans.
The fault with the Enigma machine, it's quite simple, it is that, indeed, a letter, when you
typed it 20 times in a row, it could become any letter, except that it could not become
any letter. It could become any OTHER letter. A letter never gave itself. It doesn't seem
like much, but it's important... The weakness in terms of security is that the Germans
tended to have a little too much discipline in certain messages. In particular, all the
mornings at 6 am they would send out a weather report and that weather report always
had the same form except for the weather content which changed. Notably, these
weather reports all contained the word Wetterbericht (which means weather report, in
German) and they all ended with a magnificent Heil Hitler. As a result, our decryptor
friends sought to decode the weather messages.

So how's it going to be? They take the word Wetterbericht and they try to position it on
their message which is coded. And they shift it where they can on the message until they
find a place where there will be no letters in common (since, remember, a letter can give
any other letter, but not itself). From there, they will make an assumption about the
cabling on the front. They will say, for example: here, we start from the hypothesis that
the A will become a C. And there, it's not magic, they will simply test all the possibilities
as far as the rotors are concerned. They will test all the rotors, they will test all the rotor
positions, it will go relatively quickly, until it works or not. And, in general, what will
happen is that they will find themselves faced with a contradiction, which will be for
example of the order of: starting from the hypothesis that A gives C, and they will lead
to the fact that A gives K, which is impossible, it does not work. And the machine is
made in such a way that, when they find themselves faced with a contradiction, all the
intermediate stages through which they have passed will be rejected, there is none that
can be valid, since they all follow each other, they all flow one from the other. So it cuts
the processing time tremendously. And since, in addition, we are looking for several
words in particular (in this case, they will look for Wetterbericht, Heil and Hitler), it
allows us to make more and more precise hypotheses and to have results very very
quickly. What makes that we will arrive at a stage where we can decipher an enigma
code in 20 minutes. So we went from 5 billion years to 20 minutes!

Turing was interested in lots of other things too. He was interested in morphogenesis:
the set of laws that determine the shape and structure of organs and organisms. And so,
he set up theories, in particular he proposed in an article which came out in 1952, 3
models of shapes which, in the 90s, were validated experimentally.

Otherwise, the end, we know it... Turing was homosexual and therefore, he was arrested
for manifest indecency and sexual perversion. It was 60 years ago... not 200 years, 60
years ago... He will be supported and defended by all his friends whom he worked with
and who will paint a super glowing portrait of him, but as all the work they did was in
absolute secrecy, no one will be able to explain what the nation owes him and so, it
won't save him. He is then left with the choice between going to prison or chemical
castration. And as he does not want to go to prison, because he wants to be able to
continue his work, he chooses chemical castration which will transform him physically
and plunge him into great depression.

In 1954, we will find him dead next to a lot of cyanide. The investigation will conclude
with a suicide and from there, many things will be said and we do not know if they are
true or not. The first is that, because a half-puffed apple was found next to him (which
has never been analyzed, but which we imagine soaked in cyanide) and that's how he
poisoned himself, in homage to Snow White (it's not bullshit) and the second which says
that it is in homage to Alan Turing that Apple will change its logo for its current logo,
which is a bitten apple. This is a fact that has long been denied by the leaders of Apple
but not only... Indeed, they have also sometimes denied this denial, so, in truth, we don't
know!)

In any case, there is a point on which historians agree, if we put aside the fact that today
everyone uses a computer and that there would be no computers without Turing, it’s the
fact that without the deciphering of Enigma by Turing and his team, the war would
undoubtedly have lasted two more years and cost 14 million more lives, was not the
work of Turing...