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.
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.
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].
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".
I just read that the Bletchley Park Trust needs to raise a further £1.7m on their own in order to 'unlock' the £4.6m grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund.[1]
Great to see that Bletchley Park will live on, it's one of very few historical sites that have meaning to those that are interested in our digital beginnings.
Yes, I am pleased as punch. Especially since when the Alan Turing petition was successful I bent the ear of the then Prime Minister about funding Bletchley Park. Not long after a small amount of lottery funding was announced that enabled them to make the bid for this larger amount. I don't know whether that was really because of me, but it doesn't matter. This news is great.
Here's the email I sent to Downing St. summarizing the situation on September 11, 2009:
Kirsty,
As you can imagine I have an Inbox filled with
media requests and congratulatory notes from
around the world. A common theme in these
mails is a desire to see a memorial of some
kind to Alan Turing.
Three suggestions (in order of popularity):
1. Find some way to fund Bletchley Park and the
National Museum of Computing.
2. Use the Fourth Plinth for a Turing statue
3. Name the marathon at the 2012 Olympics after
Turing (he was a very good marathon runner and
it's his centenary in 2012).
All of these are good suggestions. If the government
did #1 you would have my full backing.
John.
It is bloody marvellous that they have got the money to improve the site. I triply love Bletchley Park because of: (a) The codebreakers part (b) The National Museum of Computing and (c) it is now the home of the National Radio Centre (for all the UK hams out there) and I studied to be a radio amateur there with MKARS.
I have to say, I really like the idea of using the Fourth Plinth for a statue of Turing - especially if the statue could somehow include some representation of his mathematical works.
No, what it needs is at the base of the plinth a small screen and keyboard where you get connected to either a random anonymous person on the Internet or an AI, and you have to work out which one you are speaking to.
I have to admit that the first time I got really aware of Bletchley Park was while I was reading Cryptonomicon from Stephenson and started looking into its actual history. One of the few monuments in reality the digital age actually has. Nice to see it preserved.
The history is important, and I'm really pleased they got some money. They still need a bit more. And really, in the scheme of things, a couple of million is not much for such an important site. I am worried about them being able to get it, especially at the moment.
It's a bit depressing that programming and that kind of thinking is neglected in the curriculum.
Why use tax payers money to buy prints of Turings papers when the original papers weren't lost and the content of the prints was known? Makes no sense to me. Just so you can stick some pieces of paper in a glass case somewhere?
As I understand it they were mainly offprints (reprints of articles that were bound in the original print run) sent to Prof Newman when Turing was published. It's possible Turing owned them but not in any significant way. Newman kept the papers. Then he tried to flog them for £½ million at Christies, couldn't, but somehow he or his supporters managed to convince the NHMF to give £200,000 GBP (along with £30k (?) or so funds raised elsewhere) for the papers.
It appears from all reports I've seen that there is literally nothing of significance that would be lost with the export of these papers. None of the Press, which all seems to be based on the writing of Gareth Halfacre, detailed what was special about the papers:
"The set includes articles which have been annotated by Newman, along with Max Newman's name inscribed in pencil in Turing's hand. Accompanying the set of offprints is the Newman household visitors’ book with several signatures of Turing, that of Turing’s mother and, of special significance to Bletchley Park, signatures of other wartime codebreaking giants."
[from http://www.nhmf.org.uk/LatestNews/Pages/EleventhHourRescueof...]
It seems the public were sold a lie. People thought the papers were Turings original notes and such when in fact he just wrote his friends name on the top.
The NHMF should now just take hi-res scans of the documents and sell them for whatever they can get. Nothing of significance will be lost you can look up the papers on Google Scholar.
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.