After Hours

Alan Turing Monopoly: Board game celebrates the life of the father of computing (pictures)

By // September 10, 2012, 7:47 PM PST // nickjheath

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  • Alan Turing played a pivotal role in cracking the Nazi Enigma code during the Second World War and devising theories that underpin modern computing.

    Yet Turing's genius in mathematics and logical thinking was little help when it came to the fiendishly unpredictable game of Monopoly - with Turing reputedly losing at the game to the young son of his colleague Max Newman.

    To commemorate Turing's life, and to coincide with the centenary year of his birth, a commemorative version of the board game has been released.

    Familiar locations and events from the game changed to reflect Turing's story. Instead of buying Old Kent Road and Park Lane, players instead snap up locations like Hut 8 at Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing carried out his World War II codebreaking activities, and the University of Manchester, where Turing worked with the Manchester Mark I, one of the earliest electronic computers.

    Elements of the board are based upon one drawn up by young William Newman more than sixty years ago.

    The board has been developed by the Bletchley Park Trust, William Newman and the firm Winning Moves, which creates new editions of Monopoly.

    The board has been supported by Google, which has bought the first 1,000 units as a donation to the Bletchley Park Trust. The board is initially exclusively available from the Bletchley Park website, and from the Park's museum shop.

    Photo: Bletchley Park Trust

  • One of Turing's most important achievements was creating the Bombe, an electromechanical machine that automated Allied code breaking during the Second World War.

    The machine was devised to crack Enigma ciphers used by the German army, navy and air force to protect their communications.

    Each day the Bletchley codebreakers were engaged in a race against time to crack that day's Enigma code.

    To help with the decryption, Turing designed the Bombe in 1939. Each bombe was built to work as if it were several Enigma enciphering machines wired together and could narrow down the settings used to encrypt each message far more quickly than a human. By the end of the war, more than 200 of the machines were being used in the UK to crack codes.

    Photo: Bletchley Park Trust

  • And here is the Enigma machine, the enciphering device used by the Germans to protect their communications.

    The cracking of Enigma by Turing and his colleagues at Bletchley Park played a decisive role in turning the tide of the Second World War.

    Sinkings of Atlantic shipping convoys fell by 75 per cent after the breaking of the naval Enigma used to protect communications with German U-boats.

    The 'Enigma Machine and Bombe machines replace the usual 'Utitlities' squares.

    Photo: Bletchley Park Trust

  • The board features photos of Turing from throughout his life and includes some pictures never seen before, donated by Turing's nephew Sir John Dermot Turing.

    The photo shows Turing as a teenager in his penultimate year at Sherborne School in Dorset.

    Photo: Bletchley Park Trust

  • Squares on the board also take inspiration from tales of Turing's more eccentric behaviour - such as the tale of his buried treasure.

    The story goes that he buried some bars of precious metal for safekeeping near Shenley in Hertfordshire during the Second World War, but despite numerous attempts to find them in later years he failed to find them.

    Photo: Bletchley Park Trust

  • Turing bought this teddy bear as an adult, supposedly to make up for never having such a toy as a child.

    While at Cambridge Turing reputedly used to place the bear - known as Porgy -  on a chair and practice his lectures in front of it.

    Photo: Bletchley Park Trust

  • One of the new Chance cards, a reference to Turing's work cracking the Enigma code at Hut 8 in Bletchley Park.

    Photo: Bletchley Park Trust

  • The Turing Machine is a theoretical model of how computation takes that inspired the pioneers who created the modern digital computer.

    Turing described the machine in the seminal paper, On Computable Numbers in 1936.

    In the paper Turing described the hypothetical machine as being able to move backwards or forwards over a strip of infinite tape, which is divided into cells. The machine could read, write or erase symbols inside each cell.

    The machine would be controlled by a series of rules that tell it whether to move the tape, how to manipulate a cell's contents and which rule to jump to next.

    Photo: Bletchley Park Trust

  • Turing is also credited with inspiring the AI movement, with his seminal 1950s paper that asked the question 'Can machines think?'.

    To answer that point Turing devised a test in which machines conducted written conversations with human judges. If the machine's written responses fooled the judges into believing it was a person, it could be said to be a thinking machine.

    Photo: Bletchley Park Trust

  • After the Second World War Turing joined the University of Manchester, where he worked with the Manchester Mark I - one of the world's first stored program computers.

    The computer was the first machine to have an internal memory that stored both data and programs - a feature that would become an essential part of how computers work.

    Photo: Bletchley Park Trust

  • The message 'Auntie Flo is not so well' - a coded call-up to Bletchley Park dating from 1939 replaces the usual 'Go To Mayfair'.

    Photo: Bletchley Park Trust

  • Another one of the selection of personal pictures included on the board, showing Turing relaxing in a chair.

    Photo: Bletchley Park Trust

  • Turing was a keen runner and competed amateur athletics competitions at the highest level.

    In a 1948 cross-country race he reportedly beat a competitor who went on to win the silver medal in the Olympic Games.

    Photo: Bletchley Park Trust

  • A bill with Turing's face on it, used as currency in the game.

    Photo: Bletchley Park Trust

Alan Turing played a pivotal role in cracking the Nazi Enigma code during the Second World War and devising theories that underpin modern computing.

Yet Turing's genius in mathematics and logical thinking was little help when it came to the fiendishly unpredictable game of Monopoly - with Turing reputedly losing at the game to the young son of his colleague Max Newman.

To commemorate Turing's life, and to coincide with the centenary year of his birth, a commemorative version of the board game has been released.

Familiar locations and events from the game changed to reflect Turing's story. Instead of buying Old Kent Road and Park Lane, players instead snap up locations like Hut 8 at Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing carried out his World War II codebreaking activities, and the University of Manchester, where Turing worked with the Manchester Mark I, one of the earliest electronic computers.

Elements of the board are based upon one drawn up by young William Newman more than sixty years ago.

The board has been developed by the Bletchley Park Trust, William Newman and the firm Winning Moves, which creates new editions of Monopoly.

The board has been supported by Google, which has bought the first 1,000 units as a donation to the Bletchley Park Trust. The board is initially exclusively available from the Bletchley Park website, and from the Park's museum shop.

Photo: Bletchley Park Trust

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By Nick Heath

Nick Heath is chief reporter for TechRepublic. He writes about the technology that IT decision makers need to know about, and the latest happenings in the European tech scene.