Irving John Good (9 December 1916 – 5 April 2009)[1][2] was a British mathematician who worked as a cryptologist at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing.

After the Second World War, Good continued to work with Turing on the design of computers and Bayesian statistics at the University of Manchester.

An originator of the concept known as the intelligence explosion, Good served as consultant on supercomputers to Stanley Kubrick, director of the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

His father was a watchmaker, who later managed and owned a successful fashionable jewellery shop, and was also a notable Yiddish writer writing under the pen name of Moshe Oved.

On 27 May 1941, having just obtained his doctorate at Cambridge, Good walked into Hut 8, Bletchley's facility for breaking German naval ciphers, for his first shift.

Bletchley had contributed to Bismarck's destruction by discovering, through wireless-traffic analysis, that the German flagship was sailing for Brest, France, rather than Wilhelmshaven, from which she had set out.

During a subsequent night shift, when there was no more work to be done, it dawned on Good that there might be another chink in the German indicating system.

That being the case, all the codebreakers had to do, was to work back from the indicators given at the beginning of each message, and apply each bigram table in turn in the same way as Joan Clarke had done before.

[3] Subsequently, he worked with Donald Michie in Max Newman's group on the Fish ciphers, leading to the development of the Colossus computer.

Good played fourth board for Bletchley Park, with Conel Hugh O'Donel Alexander, Harry Golombek and James Macrae Aitken in the top three spots.

He played chess to county standard and helped popularise Go, an Asian boardgame, through a 1965 article in New Scientist (he had learned the rules from Alan Turing).

[2] Graphcore's proposed foundation model $600m computer, that uses Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, which will have the potential capacity of running programs with 500trn parameters, was named to honor Good's intellectual heritage.

[19] According to his assistant, Leslie Pendleton, in 1998 Good wrote in an unpublished autobiographical statement that he suspected an ultraintelligent machine would lead to the extinction of man.

In Virginia he chose, as his vanity licence plate, "007IJG," in subtle reference to his Second World War intelligence work.

[23] After going through ten assistants in his first thirteen years at Virginia Tech, he hired Leslie Pendleton, who proved up to the task of managing his quirks.