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by OneEyedRobot 1733 days ago
>a smart dude works on a problem that saves World War 2 and now powers your phone and your TikTok app.

So much for the Polish Cipher Bureau. Not so many tragic hero opportunities there.

1 comments

Also, this is a confusing mess anyway. Turing worked on the Bombe, but that's not a computer at all. Bletchley has one you can see in operation. It's a very complicated machine, but today a child looking at it can't help but wonder if this wouldn't be much easier for a computer.

The Bombe helps break Enigma, and thus is an early part of Ultra and arguably does "save World War 2" but it has no more relevance to your phone or your TikTok app than does the Rubik's cube or the slide rule.

Colossus isn't very far from the Bombe today, you might likely visit both on the same trip, but Turing didn't build it, and although it's clearly in some sense a computer, it is critically lacking in some features you'd want from a general purpose computer since it had a single purpose, to break Tunny in the mid 1940s.

In some sense Colossus is relevant to your phone and TikTok, because it is a computer, but, Turing didn't work on it and it isn't their direct ancestor by any means at all.