10 Apr 2009 17:17
OBITUARY : Professor Jack Good
10 Apr 2009 OBITUARY : Professor Jack Good ------------------------------ Professor Jack Good, who died on April 5 aged 92, made fundamental contributions to probability theory, drawing on ideas developed while working as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park during the Second World War; later on he advised Stanley Kubrick on the computer with a mind of its own in the film 2001 - A Space Odyssey, and popularised the board game Go. A statistician by training and a county chess champion, Good was recruited to Bletchley Park from Cambridge in 1941. By the time he arrived, the German Air Force and Army Enigma codes had been broken, but their naval Enigma code remained frustratingly difficult to decrypt - a major problem at a time when supply lines from North America were being threatened by U-boats. Initially Good was assigned to Hut 8 working with Alan Turing and Hugh Alexander, who were already using machines known as "bombes" to discover the Enigma wheel settings, based on complex algorithmic "cribs" devised by Turing using a branch of probability theory known as Bayesian statistics. During this early period, the mathematician Max Newman, working in another hut, had established a program to use electronic methods of decipherment and had recruited Donald Michie, an Oxford classicist, to help him. In 1943 Good moved from Hut 8 to the "Newmanry" to work with Michie on the use of machine methods for decrypting a German cipher system known as "Fish". The first machine, appropriately christened the "Heath Robinson", used vacuum tubes, was highly unreliable, and thus required extensive(Continue reading)
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