To examine millions of digits and letters spewed forth by Enigma (something alluring and puzzling), the German cipher machine. History testifies that his success in breaking the code probably shortened the war by 2 years. The following 75 years have seen computers harnessed and flogged to help humans do their work – the easy work – efficiently, cheaply, fast !! The ‘difficult’ work that computers do are only large collections of easy steps. The hard problems remain – an ENIGMA. And what are hard problems? Judgement, common sense is hard. Uncertainty is hard. The simplest things are hard.

Today, resurgent AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning) is riding waves of computing power to find patterns in simple things and apply them. Should I buy the costly Flex ticket now or wait for a week for a ticket to Calcutta given weather and Covid related cancellations? Is HTML the right technology to use for a building a mid-scale CRM front-end cheaply?

Simple questions, complicated by the huge number and complexity of small external factors that could affect the decision. Like Alan Turing, we are faced with large amount of data, hidden in which is a pattern, a rule, or several, which we have to find.