[simonw]

That's fantastic news.

I was at Bletchley Park last weekend for Over The Air, a mobile development conference/hack day. It's a truly extraordinary place - if you haven't been yet, you have a real treat in store.

They've already done a fantastic job bringing the place to life, and the working reconstructions of both Colossus (the first electronic programmable computer) and Alan Turing's Bombe (the mechanical device that cracked Enigma) are both completely spellbinding. They also do a really good tour.

[tomstuart]

It is excellent, and the money is well-deserved.

I wonder whether any of this money will trickle down to the National Museum of Computing (http://tnmoc.org/) at Bletchley Park? That museum is the main thing that gets me returning to Bletchley on a regular basis, but they seem to be constantly struggling for cash in their ongoing battle to keep half a century's worth of computers in working order. On a selfish level, I'm just as interested in preserving that aspect of Bletchley's (and Turing's) heritage.

[ra]

It is fantastic news. It's only recently that the UK government apologized for Turing's post-war mistreatment, which tragically led to his suicide at the age of 42.

I only recently learned of Turings seminal work on mathematical biology; he demonstrated that much of the complexity found in nature is the result of simple algorithms. His concepts we learn about today in fields such as fractals and Chaos theory.

It's possible that Alan Turing might have one become one the all time great scientist had he survived to live out his career.

Bletchley Park is very high on my to do list next time I'm in the UK - along with IWM Duxford [1].

[1] http://duxford.iwm.org.uk/

[justincormack]

They did officially apologise recently. Some more grants would not go amiss though.

[brandnewlow]

Is he not already considered an all-time great? Honest question.

[mariusz79]

Enigma has not been cracked by British but by Polish cryptographers. It's very well documented.

[jgrahamc]

This Wikipedia page covers the history of Enigma cryptanalysis well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma

Bletchley Park fully recognizes the significance of the initial work done in Poland (see, for example, their annual Polish festival: http://www.bletchleypark.co.uk/calendar/event_detail.rhtm?re... and publications like this: http://www.bletchleypark.co.uk/content/hist/history/polish.r... and the Polish memorial on site).

[mariusz79]

I'm just letting know previous poster that he's not correct. That's all.

[simonw]

I was fully aware of the Polish contribution - in fact it's mentioned on the Bletchley Park tour, which includes memorial to the Polish cryptographers.

A more correct version of my previous comment would have been "the mechanical device that was used to decrypt Enigma".