The Turing Legacy: How Facebook’s Developers Still Tap Learnings from Wartime Code – Breaking
Bletchley Park was the birthplace of Britain’s wartime code-breaking, but its existence is more than just a historical curiosity. Even some of Facebook’s engineering breakthroughs can be traced back to the Bombe, an advanced computer from the second world war. The birthplace of a super secret, mainly used for cryptography.
Bletchley Park, located in Milton Keynes, about 50 miles north of London, was part of the Government Code and Cryptography School (GC&CS) during World War II.
There, British mathematician Alan Turing and his team cracked the German Enigma code using the world’s first dedicated computer equipment. Turing’s electromechanical device, called the Bombe, was able to imitate the Enigma device and perform sophisticated cryptographic analysis of the codes, thus reading out the coded messages that the Germans were exchanging.
This technique effectively gave the Allies access to the enemy’s secret communications and played an important role in determining the outcome of the war.
After the Bombe, Turing’s colleague Tommy Flowers developed the Colossus computer, which cracked the more complex Lorentz code invented by the Germans and eventually provided the Allies with intelligence on enemy deployments during the Normandy landings.
Just as important as the work then carried out at Bletchley Park, the legacy of Turing and his team still permeates our modern world. Bombe and Colossus actually set the principles for many of the protocols that underpin Internet security today.
One example is Zoncolan, Facebook’s profiling tool, which is designed to examine the hundreds of millions of lines of code the company runs every day, drawing conclusions and looking for potentially dangerous bugs without actually running the program.
“When you look at the work that has been done to understand how to use program analytics to develop the security and security of the applications that we run on Facebook, we can directly relate that to Alan Turing’s work,” Gemma Silvers, Facebook’s director of engineering, said in an interview with the press.
“The improvements driven by this team have helped our company uncover many errors and vulnerabilities that would otherwise have required hours of human analysis. This is an example of program analysis and vulnerability detection that is closely associated with Bletchley Park.”
Alan Turing is often referred to as the “father of modern computing”, and for good reason. His work at Bletchley Park demonstrated the potential to decipher code through large-scale mechanization and led to the construction of the first large-scale digital computer. “It’s an important piece of history that our industry is built on,” says Silvers. .
The Bombe and Colossus also inspired the design of general-purpose computers. The von Neumann structure, based on Turing’s theory of computation, included elements such as binary storage data and instructions, which are the basis of many general-purpose computers today.
Facebook has just announced a £1 million donation to Bletchley Park to support its operations over the next two years as the 2019 coronavirus flu pandemic puts pressure on the site’s budget.
“There are a lot of similarities in the way we look at computer science and the way we apply artificial intelligence,” says Facebook’s Silvers. . “It is no exaggeration to say that without the work of Alan Turing and his team at Bletchley, the problems we solve at Facebook would be fundamentally different.”
Here’s another example: A Facebook researcher and University College London professor Peter O’Hearn developed a new theory based on Turing’s work on program analysis, called dissociation logic. As a new approach to code reasoning, O’Hearn’s theory has now been integrated into the platform’s vulnerability detection program to find pre-production bugs. The separation logic was open source in 2016 and is now used by Amazon, Spotify, Uber, Mozilla, and others.
The work of O’Hearn is just one example of how the work of Turing and his team and at Bletchley Park is of great help to the modern world. “Much of what we know about modern technology was driven by some of the innovations at Bletchley Park,” says Silvers. .
Of course, Turing’s legacy in computer science had not yet reached its limits. From quantum computing to artificial intelligence, the next few years will be filled with revolutionary technologies — many of which will originate indirectly from the secret birthplace of Milton Keynes.
