100 Years of Artificial Intelligence Explained

0:00 – 2:26

The Bomb That Started It All

September 1939. Britain is hemorrhaging ships in the Atlantic. German U-boats are sinking Allied vessels faster than factories can replace them, and the entire war effort hinges on cracking a code machine called Enigma that has over 100 quintillion possible settings. No human team could solve it by hand in a thousand years. Enter Alan Turing, Britain's top mathematical mind. Over the next year, he designs an electromechanical beast called the Bombe (not a weapon, just an unfortunate name). The machine doesn't try every setting one by one. Instead, it spins through thousands of possibilities simultaneously, using guessed message phrases to spot contradictions and eliminate impossible keys. By war's end, more than 200 Bombes are running across Britain, breaking over 4,000 German messages per day. The decrypted intelligence shortens the war by two to four years. But the Bombe has the same fatal flaw as most wartime tech: it's full of vacuum tubes (glass bulbs that burn out constantly), mechanical switches that crawl, and zero programmability without literal rewiring. After victory, most Bombes are dismantled or scrapped. Yet Turing keeps thinking. In one paper, he proposes the Imitation Game: stop asking if machines can think, start asking what would prove they can think. If a machine communicating only through text can fool a human into believing it's another human, that should count as intelligence. Turing dies at 41, but that single question reframes the entire field.