I need help understanding the Turing machine

For fucks sake, man. The truth is out there. On Google.

There are also plenty of computer scientists, teh JW being among the best, perhaps one of them can help.

Coming off of the terrible Imitation Game, wondering if there's a good book on the same subject that gives a better sense of how Enigma actually worked and how they actually broke the code.

Cryptonomicon (also by Neal Stephenson) is pretty fun and I think gives a good layman's understanding of the machine

Would like to know myself, I recently read a Turing bio ('the man who knew too much', Leavitt) but it was surprisingly light on Bletchley. The author recommends budiansky's 'battle of wits' so I might give that a go.

For unrelated reasons I was reading about Hasenjäger recently, a logician who like Turing during the war got involved in cryptography; but Hasenjäger was German and so was working on Enigma. I like the symmetry: two excellent logicians, better known to specialists for their pure research, both deeply involved in competing wartime projects. Apparently Hasenjäger only learned long after the war that Turing had been one of the crackers of Enigma.

Alan Turing: The Enigma, by Andrew Hodges, now reprinted as The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film "The Imitation Game" is incredibly good at explaining the code-breaking stuff in a clear and exciting fashion and doesn't slack on any other other relevant stuff either. I read it when it first came out in the 80s, meant to try to reread it, but it went out of print for a long time, but I believe it came back in for the Turing centennial and now for the movie. If you don't believe me, at the front of the book, there are testimonials from all kinds of people who are very good at writing about similar stuff such as Sylvia Nasar.

http://www.turing.org.uk/book/

After you finish that, if you are interested in a non-Turing, non-Enigma angle on the same era, read Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War 1941-1945, by Leo Marx, who later went on to write the screenplay for Peeping Tom.

DO U SEE?

Latest introduction says the book has remained in print all these years but maybe this was UK only? I seem to remember having trouble locating a copy.

His boss at Bletchley Park was Penelope Fitzgerald's uncle, maybe need to read The Knox Brothers as well.

That Hodges site has tons of extra stuff, short bio, complete text of short book he wrote about Turing as philosopher, lots of links as well as a "Scrapbook."

I am basically ordering begging demanding hoping you will read his book so we can have an interesting discussion about it.

The Leo Marx book is an interesting complement because he didn't get into Bletchley Park and ended working designing codes for the SOE.

The more I think about the film, the more it strikes me that the film probably took ENORMOUS liberties with the codebreaking story, am I wrong?

Really, you just fill it with water, pop one of those pod things full of coffee into it and press the button. I hate how environmentally unfriendly they are, but they sure are easy to operate.

i read this one, it was pretty good

http://www.amazon.com/Codebreakers-Inside-Story-Bletchley-Park/dp/0192801325/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1425336811&sr=8-2&keywords=codebreakers

The basic premise that he was this one dude working on a million dollar computer no one believed in BY HIMSELF while everyone was just sitting around trying to do it by hand seems absurd to me, is that even remotely close to the real story?

Like especially since it was based on earlier codebreaking machines that had been used to break earlier german cryptography systems, right?