Is Alan Turing's effort code-breaking effort to the war exaggerated?

That correction wasn't necessary.

 

Hitler's military decisions were mostly right and in most cases his generals agreed with him, although they denied this after the war .

 

my point exactly, Hitler was more right then you are

 

Twice a day, just like a broken clock.

 

except when the hour arm is missing

 

I suppose it seems clever to some people to do the counterintuitive approach to hitler and make some asinine points about him being responsible for resurrecting Germany, ending the unemployment, arming the country, building the Autobahn. And I'm sure his legacy would be even more respected if he didn't have to poison his bride and shot himself when the territory he commanded has shrunk to four square blocks and everyone was dead. What a bummer.

 

Too much of the last two pages has been little more than finger pointing and counter claims of 'your wrong, no your wrong more' without substantive debate on the topic of the thread. This is a sure sign we have run out of actual facts to talk about. I'll give it a few more posts to see if we can salvage this topic, otherwise it's off to bed without it's supper.*



* This my rolled up paper voice

 

You’re right. This tread seems to be derailed for a while by unnecessary rivalry. Turing was a genius, I have no doubts about significance of his contribution to code breaking of intercepts. Turings' contribution is impossible to exaggerate.
However, there were also other remarkable individuals in Bletchley park. Gordon Welchman, for example, who established traffic analysis. He also proposed techniques crucial to speed-up deciphering dramatically by identifying recurring messages and common phrases.

Welchnans' achievements are of such importance that most of his work is still classified.

Indeed there were few exceptional individuals, but what makes Station X extraordinary are almost 10.000 not so talented, yet diligent individuals who have 'enabled'* a large-scale, sometimes real time deciphering.
Contribution of Tillo Schmidt shouldn’t be forgotten too. He was a kind of genius too.

----------------------------
(*) I've borrowed this word from OpanaPointer - Thanks buddy!


PS:

It is rather late here and I will go to bed - this theme is ripe enough to be laid into bed too.

 

In addition to Turing, many people from different countries were involved in breaking the Enigma code. The short video below tells you a bit about it
Enigma. We have got news - Finding a missing report

 

All the people who worked at Bletchley Park did top secret work, which was a great help to saving lives in WW2.

 

The Med is a small narrow sea and viable routes are quite limited. Even without Ultra, British reconnaissance would have spotted most convoys. There are instances of ships and convoys which Ultra missed, and were instead found out by regular recon.

Recent studies shed some light on the other side of the hill. Allied intelligence wasn't moving in a vacuum and its opponents were not hopeless dimwits. It turns out the Italian Navy was strongly suspecting of the existence of Ultra as early as 1941, of the fact that German communications (Enigma in particular) were compromised, and of the presence of a double agent within the German Navy liaison mission in Rome - as time went by, this suspicion was proved well founded. A Kriegsmarine officer was passing on to the British anything he would get to know about Italian naval operations. The mole was identified and partly neutralized, but the leak in German communications could not be stopped as the Germans would resist any Italian suggestions to the effect that they should revise and strengthen their communication systems. As well, other soft links in Axis communications, especially the Italian Air Force's large scale use of commercial Hagelin and another encryption machine relatively easily broken by the British, could not be mended.

Things standing the way they were, and sensing where the rub lay, the Italian Navy made as little operational use of its Enigma and Hagelin machines as it could and took as many countermeasures as it could, and they proved reasonably effective given the inherent imbalance of forces (Italy had no such thing as the huge Bletchley Park organization, let alone its US equivalent). By focusing on attacking RAF SKYO/NYKO card encrypted messages, codebreaking speed fell from a few hours to 15-20 minutes to virtually real time when punched card computers entered service, and in many cases Italian ships received early warning that allowed them to dodge and thwart the forthcoming attacks. Combined with information from other sources (British codes were cracked and messages read, at least partly and with blackouts from time to time), this provided a highly valuable tactical defense against Ultra. An analysis of the attacks shows that about as many attacks failed as those which instead succeeded in sinking or damaging ships. Also due to this early warning system, the Allies were far from sinking Axis ships as fast as they wished, and as it is stated in many books on the issue. Even according to a wartime British estimate, Italy would have critically run out of ships no sooner than late 1944 - and this, taking even the massive losses of 1943 (the Death Route to Tunis) into account.

Moreover, state-of-the-art technology was being desperately mobilized. In 1943 the British TypeX encoding machine was finally broken (through one of the most secret and least known HUMINT actions of the war). For a while British TypeX-encrypted messages were easily read in Rome, then the British smelled a rat and made Italian decryption increasingly difficult. To counter that move, and possibly also to attack American SIGABA encryption, through a frantic effort the Italian Navy built an electronic computer whose prototype was practically complete by September 1943 and whose performance was more or less on the same level as that of the British Colossus II. Upon the armistice, the Germans who had got wind of it began searching for that coveted machine, but they didn't find anything - the computer was disassembled and its components hidden away. They were pulled out, brushed up and reassembled post-war and the recovery of the machine marked the beginning of the Italian computer industry in the 1950s.

 

Exaggerated? Yes. Think of it this way:

In the U-boat war, the number one signals intercept device of importance was HF/DF. Radio Direction Finding (RDF) was the most vital tool in hunting U-boats. It gave ships and aircraft real-time location of a boat as the time between intercept of a signal and its being useful to the recipient was a matter of minutes. You got a bearing and a rough range based on signal strength.
All being able to read U-boat radio traffic did was give the Allies some insight to the condition and future operations planning of these submarines. It didn't add anything to hunting them down. Radar and RDF were the primary sensors for that.
The reason early on that U-boats were able to do well in their commerce war was simply a lack of escorting vessels and suitable maritime patrol aircraft. Once there were sufficient numbers of these in operation, the U-boats were doomed.

Being able to read other message traffic decoded by Turing's Bombe likewise added little compared to being able to detect the transmission location. This gave away the location of things like headquarters and military units. Knowing their location didn't require being able to read their messages, just operators who could identify the enemy key operator (they all have distinct styles, just like writing) and know that that person was associated with such-and-such a unit.

 

A statement from a Bletchley Park crypto-analyst.

"We were all clever people at Bletchley, we all had ideas. What Alan came up with nobody could have thought of"

I always thought that Turing's idea of programming the 'Bomb' sounds so simple it is beyond most people's ability to think outside of the box.

He said that instead of programming it to find the code, programme it to find what is NOT the code. Large swathes of irrelevant code can be dismissed quickly that way.

When you have eliminated the impossible what's left must be true.

It is simple and yet brilliant.

 

Removed by me

 

What's more interesting, is that Britain built about 211 copies of the Bombe computer during the war and even with these couldn't ensure that anywhere close to 100% of Enigma messages were decoded. There were days where the German code beat the machine.

The Turing-Welchman Bombe — The National Museum of Computing (tnmoc.org)

I think a more interesting machine that could be called a computer were the dozens of "Differential Analyzers" that were in use prior to, and during WW 2. With the British, a typical one might be the Manchester Meccano differential analyzer designed by Douglas Hartree. These were used to solve complex mathematical equations related to things like aircraft performance and design, antiaircraft and naval fire controls, etc.

So, while reading the enemy's "mail" is a valuable thing, it isn't the most valuable thing. I also think that much of the interest in Turing of late has more to do with his sexual proclivities than his work, at least we can see that in how he is being portrayed in the media and movies.