The United Kingdom is hosting the AI Safety Summit, bringing politicians, computer scientists and big AI company leaders to a site chosen for its symbolism: Bletchley Park, the birthplace of computing and code-breaking (密码破译).

During World War II, a group of mathematicians, chess masters and other experts gathered at the Victorian country house 72 kilometers northwest of London to start a secret war against Nazi Germany. Their goal was to break a set of constantly changing codes produced by Nazi Germany’s Enigma machine. To do it, Bletchley Park’s wartime scientists — building on work done by Polish code-breakers — developed Colossus, the first programmable digital computer. Some historians say cracking the code helped shorten the war by up to two years.

“It has oversimplified its true contribution by describing Bletchley Park as a playground for Turing and other scientists.” said historian Chris Smith, author of The Hidden History of Bletchley Park. “Although it fits into the romantic idea that a group of smart men with a bit of wool and some yards of wire can win the war. In fact, almost 10,000 people worked at Bletchley Park during the war. Three quarters of them were women. It’s basically a factory... Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. When peace came, the code-breakers returned to civilian life and promised to keep secret about their wartime work. It was not until the 1970s that the work at Bletchley Park became widely known in Britain.”

In 1994, the site opened as a museum, after local historians banded together to prevent it from being pulled down to build a supermarket. It was restored to its 1940s appearance, complete with old typewriters, phones and cups—including the one tied to a heater in Hut 8, where Turing led the Enigma team.

Early in the Iliad, Homer's epic poem（史诗）about the legendary, Trojan War, there occurs a famous anecdote known as the catalogue of ships, which names all the Greek leaders and contingents(小分队) who came to fight at Troy. Before unfolding this impressive muster roll (花名册)，Homer makes a special, public appeal to the Muses to ensure he gets the facts right:

Tell me now, Muses, who have your homes on Olympus-- for you are goddesses, and ever-present, and know all things, and we hear only rumour: nor do we know anything

These lines reflect a central claim of epic poetry—that through the inspiration of the Muses, daughters of Memory, it can preserve the knowledge of people and the events of the past —a formidable power in the non-literate, oral cultures in which the Iliad evolved. The Iliad was composed around 750-700 BC, but its origins lie at least some five centuries earlier, deep in the Mycenaean Bronze Age---the world the Iliad poetically evokes.

The Iliad is keenly aware of its role as the keeper of memory, and credibility is central to its storytelling. The epic is a work of fiction, and relates the events of a few weeks in the tenth and final year of the Trojan War fought between Greeks and Trojans over beautiful Helen, the Greek queen who deserted her husband to elope with a Trojan prince. Its cast of characters includes not only warriors and their captives and families, but the immortal Olympian gods, who perform many supernatural acts in the course of their eager participation in the action around Troy.

The Iliad has the reputation for being an exclusively(专门地) male epic, weak on female characters, but to choose only one example—Homer's delicate characterization of Helen as a woman driven by reluctant remorseful(悔恨的) passion is as hauntingly（萦绕心头地）credible as any Anna Karenina.

Longinus, a scholar in the 1^st Century AD wrote that in recording as he does the wounding of the gods, their quarrels, vengeance, tears, imprisonment and all their passions Homer has done his best to make the men in the Iliad gods and gods men. The scene between Achilles and Priam displays this inversion and crystallises what the Iliad poets had learned in the course of the epic’s Journey. That the gods we worship might not answer, and on occasion humanity must rise to fill their place. That glory is closely associated with painful loss. That the victor shares the humanity of the most vulnerable of the vanquished（战败者）; that there is no such thing as pure victory in war.

A valuable sketch (素描) from World WarⅠhas turned up in a garage sale in Perth. It’s a sketch of soldiers playing soccer with a tin can during an unofficial truce (停战) between German and Allied soldiers on the Western Front in 1914. The artwork was drawn by an unnamed German soldier during the war on the Western Front.

The artwork was given to Private Jack Shelley, a British soldier, when he was defending the town of Frelinghien, France. The sketch is an important historical document, as it provides evidence that the tales of enemy soldiers socializing together are true. But for Private Shelley’s descendants(后代) it has even greater value, since it was his prized possession. Jessie Shelley, Jack’s great-granddaughter, has fond memories of the old man sharing stories about his experiences in the war when he came to live permanently in Australia in 1930. the family lost track of the artwork after Jack’s possessions were moved during the sale of his house when he died in 1984.

‘Great-grandpa had a tobacco tin with a dozen or so buttons from the uniforms of men from both sides. He told us all the details of every one of those buttons. To Great-grandpa they represented real people he had known, some of whom hadn’t come home from the war. He had at least two buttons from German uniforms that he told us were exchanged between the men involved in the Christmas Day Truce.’

On Christmas Day of 1914, the soldiers came out of their trenches(战壕) into no-man’s-land and shared food, drinks and cigarettes. Some even exchanged small gifts. The men even played football games together. Later, this spirit of cooperation continued in unofficial agreements between the sides to stop shooting at mealtimes and even at times when soldiers were working in the open.

This fascinating image of peace and humanity during the war has continued through the years. The sketch is a symbol of the potential for humanity, hope and kindness to exist in even the most violent circumstances.