传承八中“悦读”优良传统，在2015-2016年度期末寒假期间，八中国际部高二全体学生进行了“读一本英文小说，写一篇小说评论‘的活动。开学以来，在Allan外教及全体高二英语教师历时一个多月的认真审稿，公正评定和学生电子档的修订之后，国际部高二组团的李睿璇，潘昊辰和张诗嘉等12位学生的阅读评论作品脱颖而出。

Alan Turing: The Enigma

 Andrew Hodges (2014 version).

 New Jersey: Princeton University Press, xxxii+736pp.

Review by Roger Pan

（Book Cover, from Amazon）

Knowing my fascination in Computer and science, Sabrina, my dear teacher and mentor introduced the movie The Imitation Game to me once in her class. After watching this movie at home alone, numerous ideas pumped out from my brain. Basically, they all related to Alan Turing, the main character of the movie: Why cannot I know this figure earlier? Because there are much information and questions remained to think for me, for a person who like the what Alan like indeed. What can I do to know him more? Obviously, a single movie with somewhat fiction part is far not enough.

After searching the information on the search engine and amazon, I decide to read this book, and take it seriously. Because this is a chronological biography, and more than seven hundred pages, the thickness sound the alarm in my brain. However, beyond my surprise, the hardcore part is not the numerous vocabulary I will see, is the whole book is not strictly arranged by time, this measurement maybe helps the reader to understand how a certain incident or a series of events happened, but undermine the integrity of the whole book, I must be very careful and conscious to understand what it says.

Containing more than 700 pages, this biography describes every detail and background information. Including many letters wrote by Alan, his families and colleagues, and what American, Polish, German headquarters did and thought. Thus this is not only a biography of Alan Turing, but also an epitomize of the society before WWII, during the war and after the war.

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But who is Alan Turing? An indecent homosexual or the greatest mathematician in the 20^th century? From my perspective, I’d like to defend for him, no one can omit what he had done for the war and devising modern computer, his queer behavior, for people live in our time is totally acceptable.

He went to a boarding school, Sherborne School when he was only 13, and developed a extremely good relationship with Christopher Morcom, a boy one year elder than him, they often discussed academic question and rested on the playground together. However, bovine tuberculosis, a severe disease caused Morcom’s death, sank Alan in a deep sorrow. Even that time, everyone knew Alan is a homosexual, intentionally do not want to work with him, for him, he had a hard time dealing with normal relationship with friends, because he has no “esprit de corps”, his teacher judged him like that.

During the WWII, Alan Turing worked at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking center, for the British government. His colleagues and he’s first attempt to break the German’s enciphered wireless code is by luck and by chance, a little bit more effective way includes using perforated sheets to gain that day’s enigma machine’s setting.

(Zygalski sheets (perforated sheets) By Toby Oxborrow –

http://www.flickr.com/photos/oxborrow/37527502/in/set-828575/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=796979)

Alan realized that to beat the German Enigma machine, need a more sophisticated way to approach the problem, for example, build a new machine that process faster than enigma. Knowing the algorism and computing knowledge, Alan decided to improve Polish Bombe machine, an old machine that Polish used to decipher Enigma, it may provide a great space for Alan to improve and makes it faster than Enigma.

This name is strange, why “Bombe”? Because when this machine after done its work, it would make a big noise, like a bomb dropped on the ground, makes people know that mission completed.

After many years work, they finally devised the way that can decode message in one hour or two, that is extremely effective, make Allies knew the next step of German’s navy and army in the same day the German Navy knew. However, they could not let others knew that they broke the enigma machine, because that would make Germany change the whole setting of enigma, and they may need to spend years to break that machine. Thus they announced that the information they knew were from British spies, German believed this announcement, because during that time, British spy has a great reputation in German headquarters. Even after some battles, German improved the setting of enigma, added plugboard and more rotors make the stuff more complicated, Alan and his colleagues successfully complete their work and arose nearly no suspension of German. They also improved their electromagnetic rotor to electronic rotors, made it faster thousandfold, that made any encipher machine like enigma breakable in a very short time.

(Enigma, without plugboard, By Greg Goebel - Web page Image, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=340422)

(Enigma, with plugboard, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=109561)

Finally, the surrender at Stalingrad marked the beginning of the end of Germany, until that time, the Germany still, cannot understand, what makes their enemy knows every detail of their operation, how many U-boat will be dispatched, where are they now, and how many divisions would be sent to assist their battle.

Alan Turing, also helped authorities to decode other Germany coding machines. After the war, he worked in several laboratories and helped to build the world’s first stored-program computer ACE, and Manchester computers, which has far-reaching meaning to contemporary computers.

What need to mention, about the death of the Alan Turing, it had determined that he was killed by cyanide poison, I believed that the half-eaten apply is somewhat related to the story Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, maybe he was intentionally made the scene, indeed, he loved the Snow White story so much. Meanwhile, let his mother felt that he was killed by accident. But who knows? No one can give an accurate answer. This maybe is the enigma of his life.

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This book makes me understand one’s destiny is strictly related to the society and world, and if there had no WWII, we might have no sophisticated computer today. Thanks to Alan Turing, he makes me input the character on computers in such a simple way. Thanks to Andrew Hodges, the author of the book, makes all of us can know the truth of the history.

（A complete and working replica of a bombe at the National Codes Centre at Bletchley Park， CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=528200）

（The working rebuilt bombe，By TedColes - My own photograph., CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14901901）