Alan Turing's Notes Found After Being Used As Insulation At Bletchley Park 121
An anonymous reader writes: In 2013, a restoration project for Hut 6 of Bletchley Park uncovered a collection of papers being used as roof insulation. The papers were frozen to preserve them while they were inspected and repaired. Now they're on display at an exhibition showing items found during the restoration process. "The documents also included the only known examples of Banbury sheets, a technique devised by [Turing] to accelerate the process of decrypting Nazi messages. No other examples have ever been found. All the findings are unique as all documentary evidence from the codebreaking process was supposed to be destroyed under wartime security rules."
Turing suffers yet another indignity (Score:4, Funny)
First they persecute him for being gay, then they assassinate him, and finally they use his notes as insulation.
Those British pommy bastards are pure evil, and they deserve to have their rotten Empire collapse around their ears.
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Did what? Collapse? You're joking, right?
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Yes but are the notes (Score:5, Funny)
Yes but are the notes Turing Complete?
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can't tell, they're written in perl
Re:Yes but are the notes (Score:5, Funny)
can't tell, they're written in perl
Wait - they were written in Perl [wikipedia.org]?
Re: Yes but are the notes (Score:2)
His genius was so great that not only did he crack the enigma code, but he could even read his own Perl -- and the language hadn't even been invented yet!
So does this mean... (Score:2)
Roof insulation? Could have been much worse (Score:3)
Imagine being the guy that had to sift through the freshly dug up latrine behind Hut 6. Just to make sure nothing important was used during someone's morning constitutional.
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Re:Roof insulation? Could have been much worse (Score:4, Interesting)
That is the origin of the word (in English English at least) "bumf" for paperwork - bum fodder.
Of course, spies did salvage the used bumf and read it, so the practice of taking a handful of paper from the wastepaper basket with you to the latrines was banned after a while. Presumably by then it had also been used as roof insulation, but that had been forgotten.
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Just ot be clear here: you're implying that you like to wipe your ass on random notebook papers that you find lying around in an attic as you go for your morning walk to someplace other than the shitter, right? ;)
Well, he is British you know.
What the.... (Score:2, Flamebait)
Somebody had to see these notes, decide that they were worthless, and actually roll them up to make insulation. I want to punch that guy. How does this happen!?!?
Re:What the.... (Score:5, Insightful)
His actions saved the documents from certain destruction. Punch something else.
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This kind of thing has happened before. Some years ago (I cannot recall actual wording, read this years ago) an late 1800s old house was being remodeled. Crews found newspapers and many documents lining the framework under wall paneling. Back in the days it was common to use newspapers and other papers for insulation. Obviously they found some very old newspapers but also a original copy from late 1700s (or was it early 1800s) document. I can't remember how the story went, either one of Thomas Jefferson's p
Re:What the.... (Score:4, Informative)
You're mad that someone's action saved the documents from being destroyed? Did you forget to read the last sentence of the summary?
All the findings are unique as all documentary evidence from the codebreaking process was supposed to be destroyed under wartime security rules.
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You're mad that someone's action saved the documents from being destroyed? Did you forget to read the last sentence of the summary?
All the findings are unique as all documentary evidence from the codebreaking process was supposed to be destroyed under wartime security rules.
Maybe the OP is from the War Office?
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Almost certainly the result of someone rescuing some paper from a bin to reuse in the insulation - the notes were "destroyed" as required, but re-purposed into another process.
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You mad, bro?
Come at me!
What if he misses?
Keep looking (Score:1)
See if the Apollo 11 tapes are in there also.
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See if the Apollo 11 tapes are in there also.
Those are kept in Area 51.
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...to insulate the flying saucers
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No, a dyslexic clerk filed them at Area 15.
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I don't think they are there, but the lost episodes of Doctor Who might be.
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So I've been in meetings all day, then finally get home and I saw this story on /.'s feed. I thought, "ah, it'll be good for some immature homo jokes"
By "meetings" I take it you mean "school lessons"?
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Disapprove (Score:4, Funny)
Using the work of a luminary like Alan Turing is such a way is insulating!
Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Other than the obvious impact Turing's work had in the war effort, did people at Bletchley have any idea how valuable his work would be more generally? My computer science peers are quite good at explaining how their work might have value and impact. Indeed, a lot of scientists these days start publications by providing this context. But is the same true in the first half of the twentieth century and in the middle of a world war? It might well have been the case that his notes were genuinely believed to have more value as insulation.
Re:Question (Score:5, Insightful)
"Alan Turing's notes" is somewhat overselling it. They're not talking about a white paper: Bletchley would have produced hundreds of sheets of these kind of scrap workings every day, so they were genuinely worthless then. They're only worth anything now because all of the rest were destroyed. To put it in perspective, they're more valuable to us than a shopping list from that era would be, but less valuable than a shopping list from ancient Sumeria would be.
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Considering that we have a lot less of even the "throwaway" from Sumeria, a "shopping list" would have told us a certain amount about their actual eating habits and customs, as well as what hair products they used to get those fabulous hairstyles.
It's (relatively) easy to find great literature or buildings or monuments from ancient times, they are built to last or adopted by other cultures and passed down. What is hard is finding stuff that really gives insight into how people actually lived. It would be
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so they were genuinely worthless then
I think what you're trying to say is that they had served their original purpose. If they were worthless at the time, the military would not have gone out of their way to ensure none of it survived the war. Note that after the war the "five eyes" kept a lid on their wartime code breaking technology until the 1970's, long after Turing's death they were using it to listen in on friends and foes who had no idea such sophisticated code cracking techniques were even possible.
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There was an exception; the extensive Pearl Harbor hearings shortly after the war revealed the breaking of the main Japanese naval code. It is interesting to go through history written through the 1960s and notice things that just happened to go well for the Western Allies because they "guessed right".
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Any documents and hardware from the 1940's was also seen as a security risk. Why tell the world how the UK had won ww2 by reading German Red, Tunny material in realtime? Its a good trick that th
Re:Question (Score:5, Interesting)
Any documents and hardware from the 1940's was also seen as a security risk. Why tell the world how the UK had won ww2 by reading German Red, Tunny material in realtime?
Churchill ordered all material at Bletchley to be destroyed (both paperwork and hardware like several Colossus computers) not primarily because of the security risk. It was highly unlikely that any other foe would use the same encryption method as the Germans had.
It was because Churchill did not want the credit for winning the war to go to a handful of boffins rather than to the armed forces. This was for reasons of public morale; hundreds of thousands had died in combat and air raids, and everyone had lived in austerity for years. He did not want people to think that all that sacrifice had been pointless because in the end the war had really been won by "some university-type egghead smart-arses using dirty tricks" - because that is how the majority of the public would have seen it.
If you doubt how that is how most people would have seen it in 1950, just fast-forward and think of how most people see the activities of the NSA today.
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A Soviet military teleprinter that used packet switching was then open to the US and UK in 1945 thanks to German efforts during ww2.
Later efforts by German teams in the UK helped with the Caviar project but only got Soviet administration messages.
All that German material given to the UK in 1945 by the Germans was still been sorted by the UK into the early 195
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Are you implying that Bletchley Park was spying against their own people? Because that's what's wrong with the NSA, not the fact that they're "egghead smart-asses," or the fact that they're spying. The NSA spying against foreign enemies* is just fine.
(* Both words are important: spying against foreign allies is not fine because it leads to Five Eyes style do
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Today's allies can be tomorrow's enemies. You most definitely spy on them, you just don't go sabotaging them.
Yes, there is the problem of collusion like Five Eyes. So... you write a law requiring that a) all spies on our soil need to be apprehended if they are found and b) that we are not permitted to use material from foreign intelligence against internal parties unless there is a specific, clear, and present danger or during wartime. It can't be used for fishing expeditions and all employees of the age
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It was because Churchill did not want the credit for winning the war to go to a handful of boffins rather than to the armed forces.
Not really, and the credit goes to both the fighters and the thinkers. Aside from being the key to sinking the entire U-boat fleet in the N. Atlantic by informing the fighters where the subs would surface, this is the same technology that was used to arrange a more famous naval ambush known as the battle of midway. Churchill and his allies didn't want anyone to know about the techniques because it was a huge military and economic advantage, even the fact they existed was kept a secret, so much so that very
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There's also the fact that the Brits scooped up all the Enigma machines they could and sold them cheap to new governments of emerging nations. The British were doing their best to make sure that other people used the exact same encryption method the Germans had used.
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There were many different types of people there, but the majority would almost certainly be so worried about living to the end of the week, that "long term" was probably next month for of them. However, there were certainly a core who knew the significance, and that included Turing and his close colleagues - especially those who went to Los Alamos, and those who went on the build computers most certainly knew.
Everyone kne
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It might well have been the case that his notes were genuinely believed to have more value as insulation.
Unlikely, Turing's work was so useful to the war effort that Churchill basically gave him a blank cheque. It's doubtful the military brass knew anything about the insulation, if they did they would have probably burnt down the entire building just to be sure all the papers were destroyed. Sounds much more like the act of a bunch of engineers and boffins, ie: "To hell with idiotic military secrecy, I'm not putting out the top secret recycling this week, there are no Nazi's in the ceiling and I'm freezing my
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there are no Nazi's in the ceiling and I'm freezing my arse off here".
best explanation ever.
Next steps ... (Score:5, Interesting)
The notes will be restored and then popped into a glass display case with one or two pages visible, with a sort-of description of why they are important.
Pretty much all of Bletchley is like this, unfortunately. Stuff on display that you are not going to understand, such as copies of Turing's early mathematical papers with only the first page showing.
The problem with the whole Bletchley Park experience is that it was obviously extremely important, but is practically beyond all explanation for the ordinary punter. I think I might be able to intellectually struggle through an explanation of some of it, but the displays do not explain it in enough detail to help with that. Overall, my visit felt like a patchwork of different explanations of the same few concepts using poster boards, audio devices and video and interactive displays. It's padded out with various "wartime experience" bits here and there.
It probably seems like a very negative attitude, but a technical chap in his mid-forties with a couple of bright teenagers in tow ought to be right in the target demographic for Bletchley, but I'm practically embarrassed to say that I ended up drinking weak hot chocolate in the cafe and agreeing with my boys that it was all rather dull.
Special commendation for the rack of old bicycles at the end of one of the huts, with a hidden speaker to give you the authentic experience of what squeaky bicycle wheels sounded like in the 1940's. Or something?
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National Cryptologic Museum was different (Score:5, Interesting)
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Still the same. My dad took me there during a snow storm once when I was a kid. Having the curator to yourself is quite an experience as they really know their stuff.
The three wheel enigma is still on display for kids to type away on. It amazingly still works.
https://www.nsa.gov/about/cryp... [nsa.gov]
Another neat one is the National Electronics Museum just up 295 off Nursery Rd
http://www.nationalelectronics... [nationalel...museum.org]
They have displays on electronics concepts and quite a bit of old hardware used in radar, communications,
SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid (Score:2)
Brits hated him so much.... (Score:2, Flamebait)
Yet he did more to save their asses than ALL of the RAF.
I hope all you brits are still ashamed of yourselves.
Re:Brits hated him so much.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Pretty much any country in the world would have treated Turing the same in that era. Most of the world still would. The Brits have no special shame in that category, and they have been doing their level best to set things right. Many other countries still have yet to catch up, not just legally, but culturally.
Re:Brits hated him so much.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Tommy Flowers, .... was a British engineer. During World War II, Flowers designed Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer, to help solve encrypted German messages.
Funny, I was going to mention Tommy Flowers in a post above. I find it a bit odd that people today have focussed on Turing as the hero of that time; I cannot help wondering if it's because of the gay angle. As you say, Flowers built the first computer than can be called modern - electronic, programmable, general purpose. Yet hardly anyone has ever heard of him.
At the time Bletchley Park seemed to be divided into two "camps" and Flowers was up against some influential opponents. One described Colossus as "a waste of good valves".
Flowers even put some of his own money into building the first Colossus (there were several), for which he was never fully re-imbursed, although after the war he did get a small award. What a far cry from the billions made by Jobs, Wang, Gates & co two generations later. Churchill's order to destroy the Bletchley Park paperwork and hardware left a near vacuum in the history of computing - there are many people today who even think Bill Gates invented computers, FFS.
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Absolutely no disrespect to Mr Flowers:
The computer was the tool.
The code was cracked not by tools alone, but by mathematical insight, luck, sloppiness on the other side and a number of factors.
So while Flowers was undoubtedly the engineer that could build the machine to automate the calculations that were being done, the actual calculations and WHY they worked were the part of Turing and others. And in the process he added a whole new branch to the mathematics of the time (which we now call Computer Scien
Re:Brits hated him so much.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet he did more to save their asses than ALL of the RAF.
I hope all you brits are still ashamed of yourselves.
As opposed to forcibly enslaving millions of people around the world through several centuries of colonial rule? If you're going to lay a guilt trip on Britain, what about the US with it's legacy of slavery? And good heavens, look at the evils perpetrated in communist Russia, or Germany and Japan during the war years. Look, every country has their black marks, and some are pretty damn black indeed. If you're going to collectively assign guilt to future generations, it will never end. Ever. Future generations will also look at us and sadly shake their heads, I'm sure. We learn from the past, we forgive, we try to make things right as best we can, and we move on.
The British government has offered an official apology for their treatment of him and pardoned him, and I'm not sure how much more he can be honored and appreciated he can be at this point, not just by the Brits, but by everyone who knows how much he accomplished. See my sig.
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The "6 million" number is, inaccuracy aside, only for the Jewish victims. The death toll was much greater, but nobody cares about the commies, gypsies and fags imprisoned, starved and killed.
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You call the worst the USA did was slavery?
The crap we did to the american indians makes what hitler did look tame.
The USA didn't, as a matter of official policy, set out to systematically exterminate the entire race of American Indians. Bad enough what we did do, which was to essentially imprison and subjugate them under the weight of western civilization and technology, in addition to isolated acts of cruelty, slavery, and even mass murder. However, the comparison to Hitler means you either don't really know your history or are rather prone to hyperbole.
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As opposed to forcibly enslaving millions of people around the world through several centuries of colonial rule?
So, what about Ireland?
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Yet he did more to save their asses than ALL of the RAF.
Well, Turing had a HUGE impact on the war, no doubt. It is a bit much to say that it was more than ALL of the RAF. The allies would almost certainly have won without Ultra (eventually), but they certainly wouldn't have won without the conventional forces.
I hope all you brits are still ashamed of yourselves.
Well, the folks who treated him (and others) this way should be ashamed of their actions. The "brits" certainly were no worse in this regard than most who were alive at the time. The use of the word "still" is a bit chilling - most of the people who wer
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Yet he did more to save their asses than ALL of the RAF.
I hope all you brits are still ashamed of yourselves.
Yeah, if only he could have made it to the US, he'd have been welcomed with open arms. It was a real haven for left wing gays in the 1950s.
Re:Down with fanny bandits!! (Score:4, Informative)
In the UK "fanny" is an obscene term for a woman's genitals, so given the context you're using the wrong term and making yourself look stupid. That aside, do you have as much of a problem with heterosexual arse piracy, or is it only gays that you hate? What about pegging? Are you sure you're not in the closet?
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Damn, Fanny was one of my friends.... (It's a first name around here).
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Keats wrote some superb poetry for a woman named Fanny Brawne.
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Keats wrote some superb poetry for a woman named Fanny Brawne.
And Fanny Craddock was a 1970s celebrity TV chef.
I'm not quite sure what your point is.
Re:Down with fanny bandits!! (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Down with fanny bandits!! (Score:2)
Consider the usage in the slang term "fanny pack", which I recall from the 90's was a sort of belt-pouch not unlike where my level 12 high elf wizard keeps his spellcasting reagents.
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That's called a "bum bag" in other countries.
Re: Down with fanny bandits!! (Score:2)
Sounds like an adult film empire...
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Speak 'merican or GTFO.