AI Summit in Bletchley Park, Historic Home of Codebreaking and Computing, to be Held in the UK
The AI Safety Summit is being held in the United Kingdom, specifically at Bletchley Park, a location known for its historical significance in codebreaking and the emergence of computing. Bletchley Park, situated 45 miles (72 kilometers) northwest of London, served as a gathering place during World War II for a diverse group of experts including mathematicians, cryptographers, crossword enthusiasts, chess masters, and others. Their covert mission was to decipher Adolf Hitler’s supposedly impenetrable codes, making Bletchley Park an iconic symbol of their efforts.
Bletchley Park’s most famous achievement was the outwitting of Germany’s Enigma cipher machine, which produced a constantly changing cipher that was widely considered unbreakable. To crack it, mathematician Alan Turing, based on the work of Polish codebreakers, developed the “Turing bomb”, the forerunner of modern computers.
Encrypted Enigma messages revealed details of the movements of the German U-boat fleet and provided vital information for the North African Desert Campaign and the Allied invasion of France. Some historians say that breaking the code helped shorten the war by as much as two years.
Historian Chris Smith, author of “The Hidden History of Bletchley Park,” said it was impossible to prove to what extent the work at Bletchley Park shortened the war, but it undoubtedly accelerated the development of computing.
Wartime scientists at Bletchley Park developed Colossus, the first programmable digital computer, to crack the Lorenz cipher that Hitler used to communicate with his generals.
“They basically built one of the early generations of computers from scratch,” Smith said, pointing to the “technological optimism” that is a striking feature of wartime Bletchley Park.
No wonder the current government of Chief Minister Rishi Sunak finds it inspiring.
Smith, a history lecturer at Coventry University, said a mythology had developed around Bletchley Park as a playground for Turing and other eccentric scientists, which oversimplified its real contribution.
“It goes with this idea that a bunch of trunks with a little wool and a yard of yarn and some heads and bits can win a war,” he said.
In fact, nearly 10,000 people worked at Bletchley Park during the war, three-quarters of them women, who flooded the estate into newly built blocks of brick and concrete and smaller wooden structures known as huts.
“The way you think of Bletchley Park is a huge bureaucratic bureaucracy,” Smith said. “It’s basically a factory. … 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s always going.”
When peace came, the codebreakers returned to civilian life, sworn to secrecy about their wartime work. It wasn’t until the 1970s that Bletchley Park’s work became widely known in Britain.
The site opened as a museum in 1994 when local historians banded together to prevent it from being bulldozed to build a supermarket. It was restored to its 1940s appearance with hand-lettered typewriters, rotary telephones and enamel mugs – including one chained to a cooler in Hut 8, where Turing led the Enigma team.
After the war, Turing continued to work on computing and developed the “Turing Test” to measure when an AI is indistinguishable from a human—a test that some say modern AI has already passed.
In 1952, she was convicted of “gross indecency” for her relationship with another man, stripped of her security clearance, and forced to take estrogen to neutralize her sex drive. He died at the age of 41 in 1954 after eating an apple laced with cyanide.
Turing received a posthumous apology from the British government in 2009 and a royal pardon in 2013. The 2014 film “The Imitation Game,” starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing, cemented his status as a national hero.
Turing is commemorated with statues and plaques across the UK. One of the most prestigious honors in Computer Science, the million-dollar Turing Award, is named after him. His face even graces the Bank of England’s £50 note.
