• ohulancutash@feddit.uk
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    5 days ago

    Turing improved upon the electromechanical Polish bombe machine and used that for cryptanalysis during the war. Bombes weren’t computers. His war work is often confused with the Colossus computers built by Tommy Flowers also at Bletchley Park, which built on some Turing theory, but with which Turing was not involved.

    • x0x7@lemmy.worldOP
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      16 hours ago

      What made them not computers. Also you said he did not crack codes during the war. Is that not exactly what the bombe was doing?

      I also have not watched any movie on the matter, but what you are saying disagrees with a lot of books.

      • ohulancutash@feddit.uk
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        15 hours ago

        I never said he didn’t crack codes in the war. I said he didn’t use computers to crack codes.

        Bombes aren’t considered computers. They were electro-mechanical machines that didn’t perform calculations. A bombe was basically a replica of 39 enigma machines wired together, and it was used to narrow down the range of possible initial enigma rotor positions, to aid the manual codebreakers in their work.

        Turing’s Bombes were a refinement of Marian Rejewski‘a bomba machines, which Poland shared with the Allies in 1939.