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Tea every day with Turing
Both men were working on codes and secure communication. Shannon checked algorithms that let scrambled messages be reproduced correctly on the receiving end, work that gave him a window into encoded speech, the transmission of information, and cryptography. Few laboratories had voice encoding devices for scrambling speech, so that mix of subjects may not have come together anywhere else. He and Turing got along so well that they sat down daily over tea.
Their talk turned to simulating the human brain. Could a computer match it, or even do far better? Both thought it would be possible in 10 or 15 years, which turned out to be wrong. Asked decades later why he never pressed Turing harder about cryptography, Shannon answered that in wartime you didn't ask too many questions.
Building a thinking machine stayed Shannon's fondest dream for the rest of his life: a machine that thinks, learns, communicates, and manipulates its environment in a fairly sophisticated way. He expected people to build machines smarter than themselves. To him, the idea that a machine could never exceed its creator was foolish logic.
How did the Allies scramble voice calls?
A system called SIGSALY, developed by Bell Labs and in service from 1943, carried secret phone calls between Washington and London. A vocoder split speech into frequency bands, measured each band, and turned the measurements into digital levels. Those levels were masked with random noise recorded on phonograph records, and matching records at the receiving end removed it. Each terminal filled a large room with equipment.
Why is a one-time pad unbreakable?
A one-time pad combines a message with a random key that is as long as the message and is used only once. Because every possible plain message is equally consistent with the scrambled text, an attacker learns nothing from it. Shannon proved this in 'Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems,' a classified report from 1945. It was published in the Bell System Technical Journal in 1949.
How did Turing propose testing a thinking machine?
In his 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence,' Turing proposed an imitation game. A human interrogator types questions to both a person and a machine and tries to tell which is which. Turing predicted that by the year 2000 machines would fool an average interrogator about 30 percent of the time in five minutes of questioning.
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