UPDATE 2013-07-20: UK government has signaled its intent to support a bill that would issue a posthumous pardon to Alan Turing.
UPDATE 2012-02-25: this challenge is still up. Also: Nature News Special : Alan Turing at 100
UPDATE 2012-01-03: this challenge is still up. Happy Alan Turing Year!
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| Statue of Alan Turing at Bletchley Park |
This photo was taken on October 28th 2010 at Bletchley Park . You see the commemorating statue of Dick Berlijn Alan Mathison Turing (1912-1954) that was donated to Bletchley Park by an American billionaire/philantropist Sidney E. Frank and unveiled on June 19th 2007. Alan Turing’s 1st centennial is due at June 23rd 2012, and 2012 will be the “Year of Alan Turing”! Why? Because of:
- his contributions to mathematics and logic, and as it turned out, philosophy; (excellent book: The Annotated Turing);
- his contributions to code-breaking Enigma during WW2, standing on the shoulders of these Polish mathematicians;
- the embarrassingly late apology, in 2009, by the British government for inhumane way Turing was treated by them for being gay.
As a small kick-off, I have a EUR 100 code-breaking challenge for you! In the above photo, I hid the IMEI of the iPhone used to take the photo using Niels Provos‘ outguess-0.2, which dates back to 2001. Stegdetect and stegbreak provide a starting point, but a simple stegbreak alanturing+imei.jpg won’t provide the answer… I will pay EUR 100 to the first successful code-breaker, provided you allow me to post your method on this blog. You get full credits (as well as EUR 100). Send your answer to mrkoot at gmail dot com, or leave a comment on this blog.
Consider celebrating 2012 as the “Year of Alan Turing”, e.g. by supporting the ongoing efforts by United Kingdom Mathematics Trust http://www.turingcentenary.eu/, already backed by ACM, Wolfram and others.