What Makes Alan Turing A Hero

Do you remember when the Nazis won WWII? Neither do I. We can thank Alan Turing for that, and many other things, not least of which is computers. Turing was definitely a hero, as he was an accomplished code breaker and influential scientist. As you probably guessed, he decoded enemy messages in WWI, but also became a pioneer in the field of computers, and wrote some of the first papers on artificial intelligence.

Turing was instrumental in the defeat of the Nazis, proof he was a hero. From a young age, he was very interested in mathematics. Eventually, he became interested in cryptanalysis, the study of codes and breaking them. He went to work at what is now GCHQ in Bletchley Park as a codebreaker during WWII. They had a machine to decrypt radio messages, called the Bomba, but it became obsolete when German operating protocols changed. Alan Turing redesigned and greatly improved it to make the Bombe, which was much more successful. At one point, he and his team were decoding at least 84,000 messages a month.

He came up with the design for the first real electronic computer with stored programs. He had a dream of a “universal computing machine” that could solve any problem. He collaborated with others to design and build the ACE, or “automatic computing engine”. This machine directly influenced the Bendix G15, the first modern PC. Although he contributed a lot to the ACE, he had a falling out with the company right before its completion, and didn’t get to see his dream become a