Alan Turning & The Enigma Machine

To travel to Bletchley Park. Take a picture of the coin with the Alan Turing statue inside the park.

Then to travel to the Alan Turing memorial in Sackville gardens, Manchester and take a picture of the coin with the statue!

This trackable is a memorial to Alan Turing. He joined the Givernment code and cypher school in September 1939 on the outbreak of war. During this time he worked at the schools HQ in Bletchley park. There sole purpose was to break Enigma, a code used by the Nazis for all their top level communications. It was thought that breaking Enigma would turn the tide of the war in the allies favour. During the spring of 1940 Turing and his team built the Bombe (the Turing machine) and were decoding over 35,000 Nazi messages a week. The crux in their plan however was that they could not act on all the information they decoded from the Nazi communications, as that would alert the Nazis, and they would develop and use a new code. Turing and his team had to analyse every piece of information from the decoded messages and statistically analyse the information, how many lives could they save vs. would the Nazis know they had decoded Enigma if they acted on it. And they carried this out for the duration of the war. 

After the war Turing was made an OBE. The Bombe was considered to be the very first computer, and Turing went on to develop the very early idea of AI (we now call Siri, Cortana, Alexa). 

In March 1952 Turing was convicted of 'gross indecency' after sleeping with a man, which was at the time, illegal. He was given a choice, to take a prison sentence, or commit to a year of hormonal (conversion) therapy. Knowing he wouldn't be able to continue his work in prison he chose hormonal therapy. 

A year after he finished his hormone therapy he was found lying dead in bed of cyanide poisoning. The official death verdict was suicide. 

I have always considered Alan Turing as one of the greatest heros of UK history, despite being so little taught in schools. He defied boundaries and did what at the time was considered impossible, the inventor of AI and computers, both of which, thanks to him, we know carry in our pockets most days; and couldn't geocache without!