Join us for a pre-show demonstration of how an Enigma machine works to encrypt a message. Generously provided and demonstrated by Dick Rubinstein, this postwar, Swiss-made NEMA Enigma machine takes you back into the late-1940s to a time of mechanical encryption and all you needed to carry could fit in a typewriter-sized box.

Join us for a pre-show demonstration of how an Enigma machine works to encrypt a message. Generously provided and demonstrated by Dick Rubinstein, this postwar, Swiss-made NEMA Enigma machine takes you back into the late-1940s to a time of mechanical encryption and all you needed to carry could fit in a typewriter-sized box.

What exactly did an Enigma machine do, and why did it seem so secure? Following a live pre-show demonstration of a Swiss-made, postwar Enigma machine, this conversation turns inward to the mechanics, logic, and wartime significance of one of the twentieth century’s most famous encryption devices. By looking at both the machine itself and the challenge of breaking the code it produced, enter into the world Turing was working in, and the technical problem that helped define his era.

Alan Turing helped change not only what computers can do, but how we think about thinking itself. What is Turing’s legacy at the point where logic, language, and human judgement meet? What does it mean to call a process “mechanical?” And why does ordinary language and “common sense” remain central to questions about intelligence? As machines seem to think more and more like us, the hardest question may be what kind of thinking was human to begin with.