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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2025
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Leopards Ate My Face
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Alan Turing invented computers and used them to crack Nazi encryption during WWII helping the Allies win the war. After the war ended, he was repayed by being jailed and chemically castrated for being gay. So, I guess things are improving?
Turing did not invent computers, nor did he use them to crack codes during the war. That movie was correct that World War II occurred, and that Turing was alive at the same time and somehow contributed, but otherwise is pure fantasy.
I also have no idea what movie you're talking about. His machine though (really a model) is what we consider a computer in the modern sense: a machine that can calculate different algorithms on the same hardware by having separate inputs (described as tapes") for data and instructions. Basically with that instructions tape idea, he invented the very concept of "software". In all modern computers, different parts of memory are analogous to these two tapes. They call him the "Father of Computer Science" for a reason.
And he did help crack codes in WW2, he was employed by the British government to do just that for the duration of the war and had a lot of success. He designed and helped build the first British Bombes which broke many enigma-encoded communications, and his research contributed to the Colossus, the first programmable computer.
No idea what movie you're talking about but from what I remember he did invent the Turing Machine and had a lot to do with lambda calculus.
I am also relatively certain that he worked with computers for some sort of military thing according to the Wikipedia article.
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.
I could tentatively agree with "invention" of computers, but to say he didn't use them (or hardware that could be classified as such) to further decryption efforts of messages in WW2 seems a little insane. He was pivotal to those efforts and to ongoing advancements in the field of computer science.
I don't even understand why you made this comment. Turing was for all accounts a leading and influential mind. Why try to take that away from him? He wasn't a bad guy.
Turing cracked codes using a Bombe, which is a machine invented by the Polish and is not a computer. His main work in computing came after the war, joining the pre-existing programme at Manchester where he wrote an early program. His achievements are many, and it isn’t necessary to attribute to him ones that were others, or to do him the disservice of misattribution because he happens to be a “celebrity”.
The computing work at Bletchley Park consisted of the Colossus machines, built by Tommy Flowers to crack communications between the German High Command, while Turing was on a separate programme using improved bombes to decrypt Enigma.