BREAKING THE ENIGMA

The word ’Enigma’ means something or someone that is mysterious, inexplicable and difficult to understand. If you go by etymology, you will see that the words had travelled from Latin (meaning riddle) to Greek to English. 

Many things have been name Enigma and the thing I shall be writing about is a machine called Enigma that was uses to encrypt and decrypt German messages during World War 2.

The Machine called ENIGMA

The Enigma was an electro-mechanical machine that looked somewhat like a typewriter. It was invented by Arthur Scherbius a German engineer at the end of World War I and was used by the Germans from 1920. During World War II the machines were used by the Germans military to encrypt messages that were sent to their armed forces. The messages contained important information like the next Allies’ convoy or location that was to be attacked.

The English would intercept the messages and try to decrypt them by finding a key in them. But decryption was difficult as the machine was reset every day. Cryptologists struggled to decrypt messages of the day, and the next day they had to start all over again making the previous day’s work totally useless.

The machine consisted of a set of 3-5 rotors (also called scrambler) but only 3 of the rotors were used from the set at any given time. Additional rotors were used to make the Enigma more secure and ever more difficult to decrypt. Each of the rotors could be set in 26 different positions. The machine also had a lamp board, a keyboard and plug board. There were 10 cables which linked up pairs of letters on the plug board. When a key was pressed on the keyboard, one key on the lamp board lit up. The sequence or the ‘wheel-order’ of the rotors could be changed at any time and this could give rise to a large number of combinations of letters.

The Polish had earlier broken the Enigma code in 1932 and had even made replicas of the machine. However at that time, the settings were changed after many months. However during World War II, the Germans changed the settings daily at midnight making the decryption process very tedious.

Radio messages were intercepted and written down every day by a host of young ladies working at wireless machines in Bletchley Park. These messages were then sent to be deciphered by cryptanalysts but they did not make any headway till Alan Turing, a brilliant mathematician and cryptologist was inducted into the team.

With such a setup, there could be around 150 million million possible combinations of 10 pairs of 26 letters on the plug board each day. If 10 men worked on the code 24/7, it would take them 20 million years to decipher.  However, Alan Turing and his team had around 18 hours each day to try and crack the code before it was changed again the next day! It took them 2 years of hard work before they finally cracked it using another machine – the Bombe. To understand the Bombe, you have to first understand the Enigma!

Procedure for encoding and decoding messages on an Enigma machine

1 1. The person sending the plaintext message would type each letter of the message onto the keyboard.

  2. The signal would then pass though the plug-board and it would switch the letters.

  3. The 3 rotors which were internally wired and would change each output letter before a reflector could send the signal back to the system. 

  4.  After each key was pressed, the first rotor would move one step forward and after moving 26 positions, the second rotor would begin to turn.

  5. The reflected signal would pass for a second time through the plug-board and a letter would light up on the lamp-board.

  6. The letters that lit up on the lamp-board were copied down and they formed the encrypted message which was transmitted using Morse code.

  7. When the receiver received the message which was pretty much gibberish, he would type the letters on the keyboard of the Enigma machine at his end and get the decrypted text letters would light up on the lamp board of that machine. After writing down all the letters, the receiver would get the original message.

Most importantly operators at both ends i.e. encryption end and decryption end had to know the starting position and the order of the rotors as well as the position of the plugs on the plug board. Because of the reflector in the machine encrypting messages was the same as decrypting message - though in reverse. Also a letter (alphabet) could never be encoded as itself and this turned out to be a flaw in the machine.

The Enigma working was based on a polyalphabetic substitution cipher that could turn plain text into cipher-based text and vice-versa. This meant if a letter was repeated in the cipher text letter, every occurrence of that letter would get substituted to a different letter when deciphered and converted to plain text.

The Bombe

Alan Turing reasoned that it would take a machine to beat another machine so he designed the Bombe, also an electromechanical machine.  This machine would replicate many Enigma machines wired together. A regular Enigma machine had 3 rotors which could be set in 26 different positions and a Bombe machine had the layout of about 36 Enigma machines wired together. It was designed in a way that it could break any cipher text which had been encrypted by an Enigma machine. The only requisite was a plain-text 'crib' of about 20 letters could be predicted correctly and fed to the machine.

The drums of the Bombe were arranged in a way where the topmost drum represented the left-hand rotor of the Enigma, the middle drum represented the middle rotor and the last one represented the right-hand rotor. For each rotation of the top drum, the middle drum was incremented by 1 position and for each rotation of the middle drum; the last one was incremented by 1 position giving a total of 26 x 26 x 26 positions. The drums were coloured differently to show which rotor they imitated.

How the Bombe functioned – Imitating the Enigma to crack the Enigma!

The job of the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park was to find the Enigma key for the day. Then only they would be able to decipher the coded messages. The Bombe made their work a lot easier than manual cryptology. Also the cryptanalysts realized that did not need to look at all the intercepted messages but only at those which had predictable text or the ‘crib’. For instance the weather reports came in everyday at 6 am. So the word ‘wether’ (German for weather) was predictable. Also the Germans were accustomed to typing in ‘Heil Hitler’ so that too was predictable text.  It was later said that ‘Heil Hitler’ was the reason Germany lost World War II!

Based on the crib and the fact that no letter in the encoded message would line up with itself in the decoded message, the cryptanalysts could decipher the messages much quicker and with greater accurately than was possible manually.

The Bombe was a combination of 36 Enigma machines. Being an electro-mechanical machine, the Bombe had to be powered on electrically.  Next, each of the Enigmas replicates was fed with a set of letters from the crib. The rotors would then begin rotating and going through all possibilities and would stop only when they found the presumably correct set of letters. The letters were taken down after the machine stopped and a manual check was done to confirm the key for the day.  Sometimes the correct key was produced but often, the process had to be restarted as the key produced was wrong. Operators would then setup a separate (standalone) Enigma machine with that key and decode the messages for that day.

Using the Bombe to win the war

During the war, over 200 Bombe machines were built. However all of them were not installed at Bletchley Park for fear that if Bletchley was bombed, all the machines would be destroyed. Besides the Bombe machines, the operators also needed the standalone Enigma machines to decode the messages but since smuggling actual Enigma machines was risky, English cipher machines – Typex were transformed into Enigma machines.

Before the Bombe, cryptanalysts worked manually for long hours to decrypt messages often with little or no success, but the machine made cryptology a lot easier and quicker.

On good days up to 3000 messages could be decoded and by the end of the war around 2.5 million messages had been decoded. These messages gave the English information about the German’s positions of attack on the English well in advance. As it is said – forewarned is forearmed. Once the English got all this vital information, they were able to avert disasters or plan counter attacks. This shortened the war by 2 years and saved over 14 million lives.

The initial machine designed by Alan Turing was manufactured in 1939 at GCCS (Govt. Code & Cypher School in Bletchley Park. The machine was improved upon by Gordon Welchman in 1940.

The breaking of the Enigma was kept a secret because if the Germans found out, they would redesign the Enigma and work would have to begin all over again on how to decode it not to mention that the war would have dragged on and millions of lives would be lost.

What an ‘enigma’ the Enigma machine was despite it simplistic look! It lived up to its literal meaning of being a mysterious, unsolvable riddle. But that was only till a simple-looking man just as enigmatic as the Enigma machine itself, broke the unbreakable code and ended World War 2 prematurely.

THE IMITATION GAME

A REVIEW

The movie The Imitation Game is based on the true life story of Alan Turing who was a British mathematician, cryptologist and code breaker. He also paved the way for what we call AI or Artificial Intelligence today. He was way ahead of his time in his ways of analyzing problems and solving them.  

The movie is a thriller and it is directed by Morten Tyldum. The screenplay has been done by Graham Moore and is based on the book Alan Turing : The Enigma, by mathematician and author Andrew Hodges. The movie was released in 2014. It was a great success and raked in over 227 million dollars worldwide within a year of its release. It was nominated for 8 Academy awards at the 87^th Academy Award. These included Best Actor and Best Actress in a Supporting Role.  It won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. It also nominated for and won many other prestigious awards.

THE CAST AND HOW THEY CONTRIBUTE TO THE STORY

The role of Alan Turing is played by British actor Benedict Cummberbach and he puts up a stellar performance. On a personal level, he plays a quiet, almost frightened person who cannot understand why human beings do not really mean what they say. Yet when it comes to matters of the mind as in academics and cryptology, he is always sure of his convictions and stands his ground even in the face of rejection.

Four cryptanalysts, who work under Alan, play a great supporting role in taking the story forward. Peter Hilton – a mathematician – is played by Mathew Beard. Hugh Alexander, a good-looking guy, also a mathematician and two-time chess champion is played by Mathew Goode. He served as Deputy Head of Hut 8 under Alan Turing. John Cairncross who works as a Soviet spy is played by Allan Leech.

Also joining the team like a breath of fresh air is Joan Clarke played by Keira Knightley. She had a double first in mathematics, but did not get a degree (as women were not given degrees till 1948). Even though she got her way into Bletchley by solving a crossword puzzle clocking a lesser timing than Turing himself, she does not want to be with the team of men initially as she considers it ‘indecorous’. But Turing realizes her potential as a cryptanalyst and gets her accommodation with the team of girls doing clerical work. She is intelligent and a good listener so Turing is able to discuss many of his ideas with her. 

She brings smiles to the faces of the team members. She tells Alan that no matter how smart he is, Enigma is smarter and to beat it he needs help. But his team mates will not help him if they don’t like him. Even though she is a lone female in the group, her presence does not distract. On the contrary, it helps to diffuse the stress that comes with each day of trying to break the Enigma. When Joan wants to leave Bletchley on the insistence of her parents, Alan proposes marriage to Joan and she accepts.

The team mates welcome Alan’s change in attitude and they develop a team spirit. When Colonel Dennison fires Alan, they affirm that Alan’s machine Christopher will work. They all threaten to leave if he is fired and bargain for more time to get the machine to work.

When Alan discovers that Cairncross is a spy and want to report him, Cairncross argues that the Soviets are Allies and they are working for the same cause. He also threatens to expose Alan’s homosexuality. Earlier during the get-together after Alan’s proposal to Joan, Cairncross had advised Alan to keep it secret and now when he is in the wrong, he threatens to expose Alan thereby breaking a bridge of trust.

One cannot leave out MI6 Head of British Intelligence Services - Major General Stewart Menzies played by Mark Strong. It was he who agreed to carry Alan’s letter to Prime Minister Winston Churchill. He also stands by Alan when he fires two team mates who he feels are no good, by saying that Winston Churchill gave Alan the right to fire them.  When Menzies visits Joan’s house, he discovers decoded Enigma intercepts. Alan walks in and is lied to that Joan is in prison when she is at the market. Alan asserts that he had smuggled the papers to work out of office hours on the code. He fears that Joan may be mistaken for a spy and reveals that Cairncross is the spy. To Alan’s surprise, Menzies says that he had planted Cairncross at Bletchley so that he could secretly send out data to the Soviets which were for the benefit of the English. Actually Cairncross is not aware that he is being used and Menses wants Alan to decide what information to leak to Cairn cross so he can feed it to the Soviets.

Commander Alexander (Alastair) Dennison played by Charles Dance seems as difficult to get though as the Enigma codes. He is portrayed as a strict, no-nonsense individual in the movie. He doesn’t like Alan from the moment he meets him but has high regards for Hugh.

Alan may not be romantically attached to Joan, their relationship is more a connection of the mind but he cares for her and does not want any harm to come to her. Hence he reveals to her that he is a homosexual and breaks off their engagement simply because he wants her to leave Bletchley and return to her parents. Joan is not shocked at his revelation. She says that she does not expect him to be the perfect husband just like she won’t be the perfect wife either. She argues that they could have a good marriage as they understand each other and love each other in their own ways.  She refuses to leave for him or her parents because she loves the importance of her work at Bletchley.

After the Enigma code is cracked, Alan does not want the news made public for fear that the Germans would change the Enigma settings and they would have to start trying to crack the code all over again. The team members do not agree with him at first but later understand the reason fully. Joan and Alan visit Menzies and ask him to find ways to leak the decoded information to the RAF, and the British Army and Navy without letting anyone know that the code had been broken.

When the war is over, Menzies instructs the team to burn all documents. They are told to continue maintaining secrecy regarding the work they did and also never to keep in touch with each other.

However at the end of Alan’s life, Joan visits him and is saddened when she sees Alan so disoriented due to the medications prescribed for his chemical castration. On seeing her wedding ring (she was married to Lt. Colonel John Murray), Alan says that the ring she is wearing is a nicer one than the one he gave her (his ring was made of electrical wire).

Joan told him that a whole field of scientific study would not have existed if it hadn’t been for him. She even added that the world was a better place because he wasn’t born ‘normal’ as no one normal could have done what they all did to end the war.

THE STORY TRAIL

The movie enfolds in three time zones in is life, his childhood – as a student, as a code-breaker during World War 2 where he and his team broke the Enigma code and  the later years – after the war when the  ‘crime’ of his sexuality was exposed.

The three phases of his life run in parallel in the movie very efficiently, without taking your attention away from the main story which is centered in the mid-phase of his life. During this time Alan Turing was trying to develop a machine that would imitate the thinking process of the human mind, something like an electrical brain - a digital computer. His idea was far ahead of its time and though his superiors and team mates did not agree with him at first, he was later able to command both the respect and support of his team of cryptanalysts.

The machine named Christopher replicated the working of as many as 36 Enigma machines wired together. That would allow for a lot of code to be decrypted in a smaller amount of time. A cryptanalyst would first look for a set of predictable plaintext words or a ‘crib’. The ‘crib’ along with the cipher text (encrypted text) helped to unravel the secret messages. For instance the weather reports came in every day in the morning so the words ‘wether’ and ‘Heil Hitler’ in German were predictable.

The centre of the plot is Bletchley Park in England. There one mansion surrounded by 18 wooden Huts in which all the secret cryptographic operations were carried out. Alan Turing and his team work in Hut 8 while the machine is being constructed in Hut 11. The team worked tirelessly each day to unravel the Enigma code and help the Allies win the war.

In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ and presented with two options as punishment. One was he would go to prison and the other was that he would be subject to chemical castration and allowed to continue working on improving his machine. He chose the latter. It was not that Alan was singled out for ‘indecency’. At that time, all homosexuals were treated badly and convicted of this crime of being different. The immense value of his work was realized only posthumously.

THE THREE PARALLEL LIFE PHASES OF ALAN TURING 

 I. As a student

Alan attended Sherbone School in England. He was a loner in school and had only one friend - Christopher Mormon. When he was bullied by fellow students, Christopher came to his rescue. He also introduced Alan to a book on Codes and Ciphers and this probably proved to be a stepping stone for Alan in the field of cryptography. Both friends were good at mathematics and they exchanged encrypted messages.

Alan felt betrayed when the Principal informed him that Christopher had passed away due to tuberculosis. He couldn’t believe that Christopher never told him about it even though he was his best friend. Perhaps that was another reason why he could not establish relationships with people as they said one thing but meant another. 

II.           Building a team of cryptanalysts to tackle the ENIGMA machine

During his first meeting with Commander Alastair Denniston Alan cannot make an impression with his credentials as a mathematician who believes he can crack the Enigma that too without the knowledge of the German language! He however manages to get the attention he needs when he utters the word ‘Enigma’. Alan has the audacity to say “you need me a lot more than I need you!” Indeed Yes, his expertise was needed to solve the most difficult problem in the world – the crooked hand of death – the ENIGMA.

When Alan is first shown the Enigma machine by Cdr. Denniston, he notices 5 rotors and 6 plug-board cables and tries to calculate the number of possibilities of code it could per day. Hugh calculates 159 with 18 zeroes after it or 159 million million possibilities per day. Alan realizes that to stop an attack, they would have to check 20 million years’ worth of settings! But they had only 8 hours each day to try and crack the code before it was changed again the next day! It took them 2 years of hard work before they finally cracked it.

At first Alan expressed his displeasure in working with the existing team led by Hugh Alexander on grounds that it would slow him down. Later, Stewart Menzies tells him that if he can’t be a team player, they wouldn’t let him play at all. He also points out that 4 servicemen have died as they were having their conversation because of the Enigma. He also adds that they are not winning the war but if the code is broken, then they could have a chance.

When he needs funds to build his machine he sends a letter directly to Winston Churchill through Stewart, as Denniston won’t help him.  Churchill puts him in charge of the team. He immediately fires 2 of the earlier members. He then puts out a crossword puzzle contest to recruit more people as he believes that solving the Enigma codes are like solving crossword puzzles.

In the final round, only 2 candidates survive the challenge.  Joan Clark a lone female finalist beats Alan’s timing of 8 minutes to solve the crossword in 5 minutes and 34 seconds. Using the crossword, Actually the crossword was not a test of who would finish first rather Alan wants to find out how a person could solve a problem, would they break it down and solve it in parts or attempt to solve the whole problem at once.

They have an Enigma machine which has been smuggled out of Germany but because they do not know the settings they cannot decrypt the intercepted German messages. They intercept their first message at 6 a.m. each morning and have only 18 hours to crack the messages for the day as the Germans change the settings every day at midnight.

As long as the Enigma code could not be decrypted, the English were never prepared for the disaster that lay ahead. People were starving and all the food that was sent by American was often sent to the bottom of the ocean by Germans war vehicles.

III. The Later Years - After the War

After the war Menzies tells the team to destroy all evidence of the work they did at Bletchley Park. All the work they did there was to remain a secret for good.  They were also advised never cross paths with each other again. All the team members blended into their new lives. Initially, Alan too continued his work in cryptology and AI. However later, he was followed by a detective who believed him to be a soviet spy. When that notion proved baseless, Alan Turing was convicted of the crime of being a homosexual. He was chemically castrated and died in 1954. His  immense contribution to the war was only recognized years later.

The Real Alan Turing

The Indian Connection - Alan Turing was born on 23^rd June 1912 in Paddington London. His father was a busy man who worked for the government in British-ruled India, in Orissa. He also had an elder brother John.

Academics - At 13, he went to Sherbone school in England and then to King’s College, Cambridge where he studied from 1931 to 1934. It was here that he was introduced the idea of a Universal machine. He presented a paper on the same in 1936. His machine would be capable of computing data based on algorithms. This machine later came to be known as the Turing machine and worked like the CPUs of today. Thus the foundation for the computer was laid by the Turing machine.

He studied mathematics and cryptology for two years at Princeton College and received his PhD. In 1938, he went back to Cambridge and worked part-time with the Government Code & Cypher School (GCCS) that was involved in code-breaking.

Decrypting the Enigma codes - During the war, he designed the Bombe, an electro-mechanical machine that was used to decrypt the German Enigma machine code. He along with his team members cracked the Enigma which till then had been considered unbeatable. The Germans surrendered to Europe in 1945 after 6 long years of World War II. The war had been shortened by more than two years and over 14 million lives had been saved.

The Imitation Game - In 1950, he proposed the Turing test or the Imitation Game to find out if a computer could really think. He proposed that a human interrogator must distinguish between a human and a machine after he interrogates the person within a given frame of time. He predicted that by the year 2000, the computer would be able to play the game so well that the interrogator would not have more than 70% chance of determining whether it was a human or a machine after 5 minutes of questioning. However till date, no computer has touched this predicted standard.

The Premature End - In 1952, when Detective Nock and Sergeant Staehl, visited Alan’s residence, after a neighbour reported a break-in, Alan was indifferent to them and asked them to leave. The fact that nothing was robbed and Alan’s attitude made Nock suspect that Alan might be a Soviet spy. He started looking for war records on Alan.  However, as Alan’s work at Bletchley was top secret, there were no war records on him.

The man who tried to burgle Alan’s house was caught, he was just another homosexual with whom Alan had connection earlier.  However, Nock refused to believe that Alan was only hiding his homosexuality and gets permission to interrogate him.

During the interrogation, Alan told Nock about his time at Bletchley during the war. He then asked Nock to play the Imitation Game and decide if he (Alan) was a machine, a person, a war hero or a criminal. Nock admits to not being able to judge who he really is.  Alan was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ as homosexuality was considered a crime in those times.

He was visited by Joan at his home and she told him that a whole field of scientific study would not have existed if it hadn’t been for him. She even added that the world was a better place because he wasn’t born ‘normal’ as no one normal could have done what they all did to end the war.

Turing died on June 7^th 1954 at the age of 41 and his post mortem reports suggested ‘death due to cyanide poisoning’. A half-eaten apple was found next to him but no traces of apple were found in his stomach. The apple was never tested for cyanide even though traces of cyanide were found in his body. Alan kept some amount of cyanide in his home for conducting his experiments, hence some theories suggest that he might have committed suicide while others suggest that he might have been poisoned.

Alan Turing the Code-breaker - Recognized Finally

In 2004, a bronze statue of Turing was unveiled at the University of Surrey to mark his 50^th death anniversary.

On his 86^th birthday, a plaque was unveiled by Andrew Hodges, Turing’s biographer, at his childhood home.

In 2007, a life-size statue of Turing was installed at Bletchley Park.

In 2009, British PM Gordon offered a public apology on behalf of the Queen.

In 2013, nearly 60 years after his death Queen Elizabeth granted pardon to Alan posthumously and honoured all his work done during the war.

Since 1966, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has been giving gives away the Turing Award yearly to an individual who has made important technical contributions in the computer field. It can be compared to the Nobel Prize in Computing. However, no Indian has won the award till date.

Pros

• The story keeps you engaged. There is not a dull moment in the movie. 
• All of the characters in the movie do justice to their roles individually and as a team. 
• Dialogue delivery is in clear British English. 
• The background music score is pleasant. 
• The black & white war scenes are touching. 
• Though it is believed that Alan committed suicide, it is a good thing that this scene was not shown. The movie was clearly a celebration of Alan’s life and his achievements – it portrayed the power of the mind of one human being to make a huge contribution to humanity.

I would recommend this movie to all of my friends who are my age or above as well all computer professionals and enthusiasts. To the ones who are younger, I would want to apply PG due to the use of the word ‘homosexual’. But as the story enfolds, the movies is clean and there are no explicit scenes that would make anyone uncomfortable. I would also like people to read the book on which this movie is made.

Cons
The movie takes certain liberties with the facts of the story.  

• Alan was not investigated for being a Soviet Spy. 
• The theft at Alan’s house was reported by Alan himself but he did not mention the relationship he had with the 19-year old thief Arnold Murray.
• Turing’s machine was called the Bombe not Christopher. 
• The story also does not give credit to Gordon Welchman, a mathematician who improved the design of the Bombe.
• Cdr. Denniston is not as bad as he is made out to be.
• Joan Clarke was not recruited after solving the crossword puzzle. 
• Alan Turing was not as unfriendly and reserved as he is projected to be in the movie. 
• The working of the machine seems a little sophisticated to understand in the movie but then that is probably expected of any encryption device. A little knowledge of encryption would help.

Lessons I learnt from the movie – The Imitation Game

1. No man is an island. No matter how brilliant a team leader is, he cannot do everything himself. When in need, he needs to learn to ask for help – ‘Enigma is smarter, if you really want to beat it, you are going to need all the help you can get’.  Ask and you shall receive!
2. Appreciation even in the form of a simple Thank You helps people perform better. Alan learns to appreciate technical contributions from his team members – in his own inimitable style - “That’s Alan for Thank You’.
3. If you believe in the possibilities of your of your ideas, you need to hold on to your convictions against all odds. Alan Turing believed that he could make a machine that would break the Enigma codes, despite the fact that his superiors and even his team mates disbelieved him at first. 
4. Persistence pays – when his requisition for funds and parts for his new machine meet with a ‘NO’ from Commander Alastair Denniston, he presents his idea and requisition for funds in a letter to the highest authority Sir Winston Churchill. He also gets the letter personally delivered through an influential person (MI6). 
5. Stand by me - You are should consider yourself blessed even if only one person believes in the power of your ideas. Winston Churchill believed in Alan, put him in charge of the team and hence sanctioned the funds necessary to construct the machine. And of course Alan didn’t disappoint. When someone has faith in you – it gives you wings to fly! 
6.  You cannot please all the people all the time. Because of the hard decisions he has to make, he is often called inhuman and a monster. When he fires two earlier team mates because they are no good, everyone is mad at him. But he knows that every member of his team needs to be super-efficient in view of the work they are doing so he takes those decisions any way. 
7. Sometimes, a team leader has to put aside smaller snippets in view of the larger picture. The first night the code is cracked, Peter wants it revealed to be able to save his brother who is on a boat that is about to be bombed. However, Alan doesn’t want to do it and after Hugh hits him, he gets Hugh to realize that if it was revealed then the Germans would redesign the Enigma machine within days and all their research of 2 years would go up in smoke. Their focus should be not to save just one boat with a few hundred people but to win the war and save millions of lives.
8.  If you see potential in someone, you don’t view them as a threat to you even though they may be better than you in some areas. Instead, you give them an opportunity to prove themselves. Joan solved the crossword faster than Alan and got the job. But when she is hesitant to come and join the team and asks why Alan is helping her, he says, “Sometimes it’s the very people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine”. A woman cryptologist was rarely heard of at that time, but Alan gave her the opportunity to prove her worth. 
9. When Preparation meets Opportunity you have success. Joan was an excellent mathematician and even though that era did not let her have a degree in mathematics, she used her knowledge to become an asset to Alan’s team. When  people were being tested for recruitement at Bletchley, to crack the Enigma code, she was qualified and she fitted into team like a glove. 
10. Enthusiasm wins any day – Joan Clark is an enthusiastic person especially considering that fact that mathematicians of that era were normally serious looking individuals. Whether it is solving the crossword quickly or making friends with the team members, she does it so effortlessly. Her friend Helen is also a vibrant, enthusiastic person. 
11. Often we Look but do not See but Helen is observant and in tune with what she does even in a repetitive job of taking down messages. She says she has a bit of a crush on her German counterpart whose messages she intercepts but it’s a pity that he is engaged. When Alan probes why she thinks he is engaged, she says that all of his messages begin with the word CILLY; hence she deduces that this word may be the name of his love-interest. This observation though insignificant to her, gives Alan his ‘eureka moment’ and he cracks the Enigma code that evening! 
12. Follow rules or face the consequences. The Germans had been instructed 5 random letters to start every encrypted message that was transmitted. However, the person whose messages Helen intercepted each day, had broken that rule and this small slip helped Alan realize that the machine only had to look for predictable words. This revelation helped Alan crack the Enigma that evening – ‘In this case love just lost Germany the whole bloody war’. 
13.  ‘Human’s find violence deeply satisfying. But remove the satisfaction and the act becomes hollow’. Alan never resorts to acts of violence. At school, when he is overpowered by many boys, he doesn’t give them the satisfaction over their violence – he doesn’t fight back, he remains calm and the bullies eventually leave him alone. Even when he is attacked by Hugh he does not hit back. Violence never makes anything right. 
14. Team Integrity - Hugh is a brilliant mathematician. At first he is reluctant to work under Alan, but after he understands what Alan is trying to achieve, he extends his full support to Alan. Even when Cdr. Denniston shuts the machine and fires Alan, Hugh threatens to quit the team and so do all the other members. On Hugh’s request Cdr. Denniston even grants them an extension of one more month to prove the worthiness of the machine. 
15.  Pay attention. Listen Carefully. No Interruptions… How many of us can do that? Alan’s abilities to listen carefully and pay attention to the smallest details were the reasons why he achieved success with solving the most difficult problems. 
16. Exercise stimulates the mind. Alan runs for miles on the outskirts of Bletchley Park. He is able to concentrate on his ideas and think clearly while he is running. For a person spending hours in cryptography and machine design, Alan is just as physically fit as he is mentally. 
17. Going beyond the call of duty – after work hours, Alan smuggles out messages and tries to decipher them with Joan. The smuggling bit is not right but the intentions behind it deserve recognition.
18. Every living being has to be treated with dignity and respect irrespective of their biological orientation. In the days of old, women were not given the position they deserved at work or college degrees. They were even paid lesser wages than their male counterparts. Homosexuals were imprisoned and treated like criminals. Even today, women are still treated unfairly while homosexuals are still looked upon as aliens in some societies. Our attitudes need to change. 
19. We look at decisions as ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, but sometimes there is another decision called ‘honourable’. When Detective Nock finally manages to get Alan convicted and is congratulated, he doesn’t feel on top of the world. He had done the thing that was ‘right’ in view of the laws at that time. His investigations proved that Alan was not a spy and the ‘honourable’ decision that he could take was to drop the case in view of his contribution to the war. 
20. Gratitude needs to be given to a person who does exceptionally great work for society when he is alive. It is sad that the cracking of the Enigma code was shrouded in secrecy for many years and Alan was not  given due recognition for his work. Alan Turing should have been honoured as the ‘Father of Computing’ and a war-hero but instead, he was treated like a criminal.

What must be said is that the Enigma or any other machine can never totally imitate all the workings of the human brain. They may compute data and return answers at the speed of lightening, they may encrypt and decrypt secret messages but that’s only because they have been programmed to do so by human beings (minds). There cannot be any thinking machine more sophisticated that the human mind which each one of us possesses and for that we owe the Creator gratitude.

My favourite dialogues

There are two power dialogues that got me thinking deeply:

·         The first one is more of a motivational quote – “Sometimes it’s the very people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.” It inspires you to use the power of your brain to stand up and make a difference.
   The second quote – “People like violence because it feels good, remove the satisfaction and the act becomes hollow.” I wonder how people feel good when they hurt others. I wouldn’t want to resort to violence of any kind or intentionally hurt a helpless person.

A tribute

I would like to dedicate the following quote that was used in an Apple Computer’s advertisement, to Alan Turing:

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers.

The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.

They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things.

They push the human race forward.

And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

While everyone thought that Turing was crazy enough, to think that he could invent a machine that would crack the Enigma code, he believed in the power of his idea and achieved victory for his country and introduced the world to the field of computing.