A few weeks ago I went to the Imperial War Museum in London to watch an artificial intelligence program attempt to crack the mindbendingly complex Enigma code used by the Germans during the second world war. It did so in 12 minutes and 50 seconds. Having already machine read some German language training data from Grimm's Fairy Tales, the AI program crunched through billions of permutations generated by the four-rotor Enigma machine sifting combinations of letters for their "Germanness". A challenge that had occupied some of Britain's most brilliant mathematical minds at Bletchley Park for many months and at enormous cost was solved by a modern AI program in a few minutes for only £10. The program, developed by the data analytics company Enigma Pattern and boosted by 2,000 virtual servers, was able to check an astonishing 41m combinations a second.

How much do you know about Alan Turing, who was portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch in the 2014 film The Imitation Game? October 1931 Turing takes up a mathematics scholarship at King's College Cambridge, earning a first-class degree. March 1940 The first Bombe machine, designed by Turing, arrives at Bletchley. The coroner's verdict is that he had taken his own life The founding father of computing played a vital role in breaking German codes during the Second World War. In September 1939, just as the Second World War was declared, a young man arrived to stay at the Crown Inn in the hamlet of Shenley Brook End, Buckinghamshire.

Enigma, first produced by a German engineer named Arthur Scherbius, is an electro-mechanical encoded communication machine. Its use was evaluated for commercial purposes as it was started after WW1. However, in the aftermath of World War II, Germany was used in military and government services and had great benefits. Enigma models, which are used by Nazi Germany, are much more advanced. Because of its complex encryption systems, it was preferred to send military information.

Divers recovered the device at the bottom of Gelting Bay, on Germany's northern coast, while working to remove abandoned fishing nets that threaten marine life. Designed shortly after WWI by the engineer Arthur Scherbius for commercial usage, the cipher engine was adopted by many national governments and militaries. The portable device is best-known for its use by the Axis powers to encode military commands, for safe transmission by radio, as part of their rapid'blitzkrieg' strategy. Enigma featured a number of wheels, which together formed an electric circuit that repeatedly scrambled an entered character -- and reconfigured after each letter. German military models -- made more complex through the addition of a plugboard, for added scrambling -- and their codebooks were highly sought by the allies.

Bletchley Park was the site where Alan Turing and a World War II team of code-breakers cracked Germany's Enigma machine and helped save the world from Nazi tyranny. The site is now a popular museum, but it's facing a £2 million ($2.6 million) revenue shortfall due to the loss of tourism caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, Facebook has announced that it will donate £1 million to the Bletchley Park Trust charity that runs the site. In a blog post, Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer wrote that Facebook felt "lucky" to be involved with the site, and that the company "simply would not exist today" without its achievements. "The work of its most brilliant scientist, Alan Turing, still inspires our tens of thousands of engineers and research scientists today," he added.

Necessity has most always been the mother of inventions. During World War II, the Enigma machine developed by Germany was proving to be a severe headache for the allies as they were unable to decipher messages that were encoded by Enigma. They went a step ahead by developing the Bombe machine through a team headed by the genius British scientist Alan Turing, who is widely regarded as the father of modern computing. The Enigma and Bombe machines can be regarded as having laid the foundation for future "intelligent" machines. Necessity has most always been the mother of inventions. During World War II, the Enigma machine developed by Germany was proving to be a severe headache for the allies as they were unable to decipher messages that were encoded by Enigma.

A fascinating new video gives a unique look inside the Enigma cipher machine used by the Nazis during World War Two and famously cracked by a team of code breakers led by British mathematician Alan Turing. Scientists used state-of-the-art X-ray scans to peer inside the Enigma's metal casing, revealing the wiring and rotors that encrypted the messages sent using the machine. In total, more than 1,500 scans were taken of an Enigma machine built in Berlin in 1941 - one of just 274 known to have survived the war. Enigmas, which resembled large typewriters, were used by German air, naval and army forces to safely send messages throughout the Second World War. It used a complex series of rotors and lights to encrypt messages by swapping letters around via an ever-changing'enigma code'.

Computer historians have staged a re-enactment of World War Two code-cracking at Bletchley Park. A replica code-breaking computer called a Bombe was used to decipher a message scrambled by an Enigma machine. Ruth Bourne, a former wartime code-cracker who worked at Bletchley and used the original Bombes, oversaw the modern effort. Enigma machines were used extensively by the German army and navy during World War Two. This prompted a massive effort by the Allies to crack the complex method they employed to scramble messages.

The UK's National Museum of Computing has expanded its exhibits celebrating the UK's wartime code-breakers and the machines used to crack German ciphers. On Saturday it will open a gallery dedicated to the Bombe, which helped speed up the cracking of messages scrambled with the Enigma machine. The Bombe was formerly on display at Bletchley Park next door to the museum. A crowd-funding campaign raised £60,000 in four weeks to move the machine and create its new home. The replica Bombe is a copy of the electro-mechanical machines used in World War II at Bletchley.

Pamela McCorduck, a prolific author on the history and future of artificial intelligence and the widow of Joseph Traub, a renowned computer scientist and the former head of CMU's Computer Science Department, permanently loaned to the university a collection of early computers, books and letters. The collection, anchored by a three-rotor and four-rotor Enigma machine, is on display in the Fine and Rare Book Room in CMU's Hunt Library in Oakland. The gift makes CMU one of a few institutions in the United States with Enigma machines.