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SimplyUseless

Alan Turing's achievements

* Designed the programming of world's first commercial computer (Ferranti Mark 1)

* Devised Turing Test, to test whether computer is capable of thinking like a huamn

* Got an OBE for his wartime services

* Inventor of Turing Machine. To this day, all stored-programme digital computers are modelled on this invention

* Built the machine that helped in the breaking of the Enigma code used by the German forces. This was used to decode 2 messages per minutes

* His work shortened the WW2 by atleast 2 years.

* Alan was a member of the team which decoded the 'Fish' cipher, which was used towards the end of the war by the German High Command to transmit messages between Hitler and senior officers in the field.

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A few years before the Ferranti Mark 1, Turing was involved with the programs for the Mark 1's predecessor: Baby (1948) [1], the worlds first stored-program computer, which as you mentioned was based on his Turing Machine (1936).

I learned about Turing as part of Baby's and the Mark 1s history first before any wartime efforts as I did my BSc at the University of Manchester. Also only later would I realise the honour of Tom Kilburn handing me my degree when I graduated and having nice chat with as well.

* [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Baby#First_programs

> His work shortened the WW2 by at least 2 years.

If the Reich had lasted longer, they would have gotten the nuke rather than Japan.

Would they have? I don’t pretend to be an expert on plausible alternative history, but as the USSR reached Berlin before the UK/USA/French forces, I can easily imagine that without Turing’s work the Iron Curtain would’ve been either through the English Channel or along the Rhine, while the Pacific war would’ve gone the same way.

> Would they have?

It was built with the intention of dropping it on Germany. Germany surrendered before it was ready.

The primary difference that Enigma made was shipping to Russia and the UK. It’s likely it would have hurt both, but once the escort carriers started showing up in the Atlantic, the ability to operate subs would have gone away anyways.

In the pacific, not a chance. The soviets rolled the Kwantung army at the end of the war, but that’s because it was stripped of all it’s assets well before the soviets showed up, as the Japanese desperately tried to re-enforce islands that the Americans later isolated and island hopped and starved into submission by virtue of the “Big Blue Fleet”. The atomic bombs may not have ended the war, but ending the war with a invasion or a starvation blockade required a massive naval armada, and the Soviets had nothing. The Brits barely were able to operate in theater.

Engima’s impact on the battlefield was much more muted then the submarine war especially compared to Purple / Hypo / Market Garden and The battle of the Bulge where both lulled into disaster by the lack of enigma intelligence. It did play a positive role in Africa and on D-day (where it was most useful in revealing fortifications on the beaches), but it was not decisive there.

Engima never made it’s way to the pacific. In the pacific, Corel Sea, Midway and the assassination of Yamamoto where all predicated on decrypted secrets, but this was a completely separate effort from Bletchley Park.

> His work shortened the WW2 by atleast 2 years.

And was then pushed to suicide by the intelligence agencies of the country he saved hundreds of thousands of lives for.

For the crime of being gay.

No, it was just ordinary police and a court conviction that did that. The intelligence agencies likely knew about his orientation long before and did nothing about it - if anything, it was something that could be used to control him.

Modern computers aren't really based on the Turing machine idea any more than they're based on the Lambda calculus, and I think it's questionable that the early computers were intentionally modelled on it.

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