Major achievements

Despite its short history as a formal academic discipline, computer science has made a number of fundamental contributions to science and society. These include:

The German military used

theEnigma machine during World War II for communication they thought to be secret. The large-scale decryption of Enigma traffic atBletchley Park was an important factor that contributed to Allied victory in WWII.

• The start of the "digital revolution," which includes the current Information Age and the Internet.
• A formal definition of computation and computability, and proof that there are computationallyunsolvable and intractable problems.
• The concept of a programming language, a tool for the precise expression of methodological information at various levels of abstraction.
• In cryptography, breaking the Enigma machine was an important factor contributing to the Allied victory in World War II.
• Scientific computing enabled advanced study of the mind, and mapping of the human genome became possible with the Human Genome Project.^[16] Distributed computing projects such asFolding@home explore protein folding.
• Algorithmic trading has increased the efficiency and liquidity of financial markets by using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other statistical and numerical techniques on a large scale.