Turing's Nature Patterns - Code 3

Turing’s Patterns explain how the pattern of scales found on sharks is formed. The patterns of scales is very important because it reduces drag while swimming, helping the shark to move easily through the water.

There are 21 resident shark species around the UK – but don’t worry, they’re all harmless! One of the most common sharks found around the coast of Cumbria is the small spotted catshark, which feed on crabs and fish. When the small spotted catshark is threatened, it curls up into a donut shape!

Creating The Bombe

In 1939, Turing started working at the wartime headquarters of Britain’s top codebreakers: Bletchley Park. The people here were working on breaking the military codes used by the Nazis.

The Nazis were using a cypher machine called Enigma to encode and transmit information securely. Polish researchers had made some progress with breaking Enigma codes and shared this information with the British. However, the Nazis increased their security at the start of the war by changing the codes every day! This made the codes even more difficult to break.

With the codes changing daily and 159,000,000,000,000,000,000 (159 quintillion) possible combinations every day, the staff at Bletchley Park worked around the clock to break the settings by hand. It was clear that a mechanical method for breaking the code was desperately needed. Turing helped develop the Bombe - a machine that could quickly break the Enigma machine's codes. This meant that the Nazi's messages were decoded in time for the information they contained to be acted on. This played a major role in the Allies winning the war. For example, in 1944, by decrypting the Enigma code the Allies could read the Nazi's plans for defending against the D-Day invasion. Throughout this, the Nazis remained unaware that their 'unbreakable' Enigma machines had actually been cracked by the Allies.

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