"A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human."
"Machines take me by surprise with great frequency."
"We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done."
"In 1939, Turing returned to England to join the newly formed, top-secret Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. This organization’s task was to break the codes used by the German military to communicate with troops in the field, especially those on Uboats at sea. One of these codes employed the German cypher machine Enigma."
A recreation of the Bombe in the Bletchley Park museum.
Building on work begun by Polish intelligence, Turing designed an electromechanical machine known as the Bombe. Turing’s group was so successful at decrypting German messages that Britain’s military had to disguise their responses to hide the fact that they came from intercepted communications.
Bletchley Park was a private house which was taken over by the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6 to you and me) in 1938. There was a small code-breaking organization between the wars called the Government Code & Cypher School, which was part of MI6, and they moved in just before the war began. This is where Turing worked during the War.