Alan Turing Centenary
Starting tomorrow, Jun 23, 2012, many countries are to celebrate the centeray birth year of Alan Turing. Alan created the Turing machine concepts and formalized algorithm and computation that are now in use in all our computers (including your portable phone and your electronic watch.)
He actually participated to the creation of the first electronic computer during second world war in England. His algorithms and knowledge of cryptography gave him the necessary skills to crack the encoding of the German Enigma Machine (a form of printer that would encode messages with a level of complexity too high for humans to decypher quickly enough. The German Navy used a more advanced version giving them 1.8×1021 possible encryptions.) There is a working replica of that first computer, the bombe, at the National Codes Center in Bletchley Park.
After the war, he went on and helped in the building of several different computers in the UK. He died at age 42 by cyanide poisoning, probably suicide as he was prosecuted for being an homosexual.
Happy 100th birthday!
And Thank You For All the Fun! 
