Britain releases historic code papers

The British government says it is releasing two 70-year-old papers by computer pioneer Alan Turing on the theory of code breaking. It is believed Turing wrote the papers during World War II while at Britain's code-breaking center at Bletchley Park working to crack German Enigma codes. The fact the contents had been restricted for so long "shows what a tremendous importance it has in the foundations of our subject," a mathematician at GCHQ, the British government's communications headquarters, said. The papers, one entitled The Applications of Probability to Crypt, and the other headed Paper on the Statistics of Repetitions, discuss mathematical approaches to code breaking, the BBC reported. The release of the papers, available for public viewing at the National Archives at Kew in west London, comes amid celebrations to mark the centenary of Turing's birth. Turing developed a number of projects while at Bletchley Park, including a secure speech system called Delilah, which encoded and decoded voice communications in a similar way to a telephone scrambler. A recreation of the system is being built at Bletchley by a team led by volunteer John Harper. "Alan Turing just had brilliant ideas way ahead of their time which were terribly important to the future of the world, if you like," Harper said.