THE STORY BEHIND ENIGMA
There is a new movie out called “The Imitation Game” it is about the life of the bril-liant mathematician/philosopher Alan Turing- Inventor of the Programmable Computer as we know it today.
The movie chronicles how Turning broke the code to find the settings for the German secret coding ma-chine called Enigma, thus in fact bringing about an end to World War II and saving millions upon millions of lives.
I have been asked by many since the movie came out, how is it that our company is called Enigma. The fact is I did it as a tribute to Alan Turing for his contribution to the computer, and it is ironic that the movie has come out as we are raising money.
The word Enigma is 16th century Greek; meaning something very difficult to understand or solve.
Yes, there were calculating machines before but they were mechanical, more like the adding machine of old. Turing now the father of computer science created the concept of operating software in the computer. By doing this he now had a programmable system that had the machine not only calculate data but for the first time ever use logic to interpret the solution. Of course Turing needed to develop a programing language to create the operating software and with his philosophy mastery he knew he needed a natural language, one that functioned like the human brain in order to have it think.
This meant the computer had to understand why and determine when one thing causes another and what lead to the prior thing to occur, all the way back to the original event, (called complex event processing). The language would be very different from anything we have ever seen or used today, looking like a graphical language of
symbolic shapes.
While solving the encryption code of the Enigma machine he began to develop this language, Ironically the Enigma machine was first offered to the US Military, who rejected it, it was then adopted by the German military who used it to nearly win WWII.
While experts had argued the task was impossible Turing new that thinking was relative; while the scope forhuman thinking in the context of the universe is all but infinite, he proposed that the thinking needed in the closed universe of a computer software application was finite. If the application knew that each activity was caused by a preceding event that was correct the machine when stopping anything other than an valid cause was in fact thinking. This later would become known as the Turing test.
Sadly, even though Turing had solved the most complex mechanical machine coder in the world, by creating a computer with a programmable language, he would never see the language finished for use in programmable languages.
Shortly after saving the Allies in the war, Turing was charged with being homosexual, illegal in the 1940’s and was chemically castrated, 2 years later he committed suicide from depression.
Whereas he would have continued the development of the graphical language needed in order to have computers understand what they were doing, his work ended and the brilliance died with him.
The burgeoning computer industry now moving forward with no understanding of the need for Cause and Effect computations that could only be completed by a graphical based language (highly documented in our proposal), went on to use Boolean based language, still used in all software in operation today.
The sad moral of the story, so to say, had the US military not rejected this and not brought about his suicide, the computers of today would have been created based on a Causal Graphical language (as is our patented technology), with this there would have never been a way to hack a computer and the entire notion of Cyber hacking and Cyber war would have been a non-existent matter.
“We” in essence broke the enigma of the flaw in computer language design allowing intrusion: using the same methodology logic Alan Turing used to break the encryption of the Nazi coding machine.
I believed it was befitting to honor the man that ended WWII, created the first software based computer and un-raveled the code of the Enigma machine, by naming our technology that can end it all; Enigma.
Dr. David Chalk d.Tec
