Turing was assigned to a team working in Hut 8 that was trying to break the German Enigma code, which was generated by a portable machine with mechanical rotors and electrical circuits. It encrypted military messages by using a cipher that, after every keystroke, changed the formula for substituting letters. That made it so tough to decipher that the British despaired of ever doing so. A break came when Polish intelligence officers created a machine based on a captured German coder that was able to crack some of the Enigma codes. By the time the Poles showed the British their machine, however,
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