> During World War II, those friends included Alan Turing, with whom Shannon struck up a lively intellectual exchange during Turing’s fact-finding trip to study American cryptography on behalf of the British government.
This little tidbit has always fascinated me from a What-If perspective, because of course because of the War and secrecy, Turing and Shannon did not discuss cryptography, the Bombe (Turing's Enigma-cracking machine) or the Colossus (arguably the first electronic computer, except its very existence remained a secret until the 1970s).
How would've things gone had they been able to talk freely?
This little tidbit has always fascinated me from a What-If perspective, because of course because of the War and secrecy, Turing and Shannon did not discuss cryptography, the Bombe (Turing's Enigma-cracking machine) or the Colossus (arguably the first electronic computer, except its very existence remained a secret until the 1970s).
How would've things gone had they been able to talk freely?