Last week it was announced that Alan Turing will feature on the newest design of the £50 note, and here at RedCompass Labs, we couldn’t be more delighted. If you read our previous blogs, or have seen our recent web animation or marketing materials, you’ll notice that Alan Turing is a popular feature. That’s because he is one of our heroes. We want to take this opportunity to celebrate Alan Turing and tell you why we admire him….
Alan Turing had a phenomenal ability to see data differently.
Famously, he played an instrumental role in the team at Bletchley Park who solved the seemingly impossible puzzle of cracking the Enigma code. It’s estimated that through this work, Turing and the team at Bletchley Park saved 14 million lives and shortened the Second World War by two years.
Most people know that he cracked the code, but they don’t know how he cracked it.
Alan Turing had an outstanding ability to see patterns in enormous amounts of data. He could see through the fog. To crack the code, Alan Turing needed to identify the correct settings out of a possible 103 sextillion combinations. That’s not a fog of data, that’s a black hole!
Can you see what Alan Turing saw? I ran “RedCompass Labs” through an online enigma machine and the results are below:
REDCOMPASS --> IUVRSVLWZF
Can you see the pattern? It’s so simple when you see it!
Every letter is encrypted as a different letter, but never as itself. The R of “RedCompass” could be encrypted as any letter, but not R.
This was the ground-breaking moment which arguably changed the course of history. From there, Turing and the team could start to better understand the data they were looking at, and other areas started to get clearer until they eventually cracked it. They had created clarity from the fog.
Another thing that people don’t realise about Alan Turing, is that he is widely considered the father of computer science and the pioneer of Artificial Intelligence.
Eight years before the term ‘A.I.’ was even coined, Turing and his colleague began working on Turbochamp, the first ever computer programme. Turing was so ahead of his time that computers were not powerful enough to run the algorithm, so he did the calculations by hand. The algorithm calculated all your potential moves, and all the opponent’s potential responsive moves, assigned a score to each result and then selected the move with the highest score.
Alan Turing looked at one of history’s oldest ever strategy games, that people have spent lifetimes mastering – and he thought about it in a completely different way. In three moves, a simple game of chess can transform into a blinding amount of data. After both players make their initial move in a game of chess, there are 400 possible board set ups, after both players take their second turn, there’s 197,742 possible games, and after three moves, 121 million. Through his algorithm, Turing could make sense of the chaos; he could see through the fog.
One of Alan Turing’s insightful quotes appears on the new £50 note - “This is only a foretaste of what is to come and only the shadow of what is going to be.” How very true.