Everyone's heard of Churchill, but not Turing

@RABEL222,

programmable electronic computer

That puts the Greeks out.
Mr. Green

Joe(You have to plug it in)Nation

@BillRM,

BillRM wrote:

Quote:
Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic computer

I need to check the dates but as far as I am aware of at the moment ENIAC had a claim to that title..

In fairness, Colossus was kept highly secret for a long time after WW2, and was probably still classified when you were learning about ENIAC.

Quote:

Throughout this period the Colossus remained secret, long after any of its technical details were of any importance. This was due to the UK's intelligence agencies use of Enigma-like machines which they promoted and sold to other governments, and then broke the codes using a variety of methods. Had the knowledge of the codebreaking machines been widely known, no one would have accepted these machines; rather, they would have developed their own methods for encryption, methods that the UK services might not have been able to break. The need for such secrecy ebbed away as communications moved to digital transmission and all-digital encryption systems became common in the 1960s.

Information about Colossus began to emerge publicly in the late 1970s, after the secrecy imposed was broken when Colonel Winterbotham published his book The Ultra Secret. More recently, a 500-page technical report on the Tunny cipher and its cryptanalysis – entitled General Report on Tunny – was released by GCHQ to the national Public Record Office in October 2000; the complete report is available online, and it contains a fascinating paean to Colossus by the cryptographers who worked with it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer

0 Replies

My favorite part of the Turing story, at least as reported by RadioLab, was that, while trying to figure out the Enigma Code , Turing had two insightful thoughts:
the first was that if the Enigma Code was being generated by a machine...(For those who don't know, the Enigma Coding Machine made a new code for every new message.) ....it would take a machine to decode it.

So, he made a machine that could try thousands of trial codes in a hour. That was a lot then, nowadays we have computers which can try millions of codes in less a than a minute.

The second insight, and the far simpler one, was that the Germans were people.
AND people had routines. He figured that the first few words of every message might be nearly the same. He made lists of possibilities: Heil, Attention, TO Commander (whatever).

Even knowing what four digits correspond to four letters is a major advantage in code-breaking. If you know what E and I are it's not hard to pattern for what might be O, A, U etc.

So, it will take a machine to match a machine and the flaw in the code is we are all too much like people.

Joe(At least some of us)Nation

2 Replies

@Joe Nation,

Picky, picky.

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@Joe Nation,

I'm sure I'm not the first to think of this, but I always thought it silly that codes should use the same number of symbols as the words themselves.

Now this might seem like an impossibility to be otherwise, but it's very simple - add a symbol/letter (whether at the start, the finish, the 2nd letter, or alternating in a pattern) into each word (you can have every 3rd miss the additional letter, or every 2, 5, 3, 1 etc)...the additional symbols/letters themselves then refer to a code that breaks each word. You are now not using one code, but a plethora of codes to form a sentence.

As for Turing not being as well known - the enigma code itself is not as well known as Churchill. Followers and support staff are rarely as well known as the leaders of major wars. It's not at all surprising.

1 Reply

@vikorr,

I think they call it padding Vikorr and is normally done even in ww2.

1 Reply

@Joe Nation,

Before my father became a medic (and later a military surgeon), he was conscripted as wireless operator. And used the ENIGMA.

He always told that they didn't believe at would take long to encode the messages, because ... there were 'people' on the other side as well.
[He actually didn't believe a lot of he was told: when he was ordered to go to "the other side" (= English coast] a second time, he filed his rucksack with paper, left his gas mask in the barracks only carrying the box ...]

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@BillRM,

Padding or shift codes:

Here is the alphabet:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

You pick a six or seven letter word with no repeated letters, a nonsense word works best.
AMBROSE
then you put it on the front or the middle or the end of alphabet.
Shift any section like TUVWXYZ that still match up to the front of second line of the key.

A M B R O S E C D F G H I J K L N P Q T U V W X Y Z
T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S

LQVBHCDQH2PUVR

is

what?

Joe(crypto)Nation

0 Replies

Everyone's heard of Churchill, but not Turing

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