Coinciding with the first AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park in England and released on the same day, the Bombe typeface highlights the achievements made with artificial intelligence during the second world war until date. Bombe integrates the Monylop Principle and is monospaced, concordant to that of the TypeX machine.₁
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2.
Alan Mathison Turing (1912–1954) was a mathematician whom, during the war period with his team, built The Bombe, an Enigma code-breaking machine, at Letchworth, which was then delivered to Bletchley. Thousands of German encrypted top-secret communications via Morse code radio transmissions were disentangled by The Bombe and as a result provided Britain with vital evidence towards locating German military divisions.
3. The Bombe machine encompassed thirty six component relays (Bombes) turned in series’ of rotations to immitate the encryptions made by the German Enigma text scramblers. Turing’s heuristic calculations of Enigma messages fed through The Bombe, where tested and approved back via the Enigma, in order to reach the same combination setting of the three rotors ‘wheel order’.₂
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4. D. G. M. visited the office of Alan Turing at Bletchley Park in 2009 and learnt about his extraordinary heroic, yet tragic life.₃
Turing is considered the founder of artificial intelligence and computer science due to his rapid technological developments made via ‘machine intelligence’ during his lifetime.
3. Originally entitled Turing (2007), the Bombe typeface has since undergone major modification. Bombe is attuned to the Monylop Principle and is set to monospace.₄ Bombe also incorporates an additional layer – the highlights are scripted into the typeface file as a defined colour palette (white), making Bombe the first D. G. M. OpenType colour-fount release.₅ When typed on a coloured background the highlights therefore remain white, which gives the glossy appearence of embossed illumination.₆
© 2009, D. G. M.
₁ Teletype is the machanical means of translating Morse code into typed-out text. The TypeX was the British augmented replica of the German Enigma but housed five rotors and doubled reflection.
₂ The Bombe machine evolved from the Polish ‘Bomba’ machine Bomba Kryptologiczna, invented in/around 1938.
₃ Alan Turing was openly homosexual, even at his university, the University of Cambridge. However, during that period homosexual acts were deemed a criminal offence. After the war ended Turing’s house was burgled. He mentioned to the police about his relationship with man and was therefore convicted and put on trial. As a punishment he had two options, imprisonment or probation with conditional chemical castration (hormone treatment as an to attempt to supress his sexual desire). He chose the later and as a result of oestrogen steroid intake for the course of one year, his body transformed, which led him to suicide. Inspired by Snow White, he bit into an apple laced with cyanide, which put him into a ‘sleeping death’.
₄ A pixel monospace typeface, suitable for display or small-scale text and set alignment. The Monylop Principle.→
₅
Also known as chromatic fonts, Adobe Illustrator supports OpenType-SVG color fonts (Scalable Vector Graphic). Most web browers support colour webfonts, all Fig’s above demonstrate this file format.
₆ The highlights to the Bombe typeface also provoke a taste for la bombe glaceé traditional French desert.
The photograph was taken by David G. Millhouse in 2009, with an Olympus Trip 35 on Ilford-FP4/125, developed by hand then scanned.
Implementation:
https://www.davidmillhouse.com/PetrovskyRamone.html
http://www.petrovskyramone.com
