Enigma-Cracking Bombe Recreated

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Enigma-Cracking Bombe Recreated

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Thursday September 7, 2006 @05:10AM from the we-shall-never-surrender dept.

toxcspdrmn writes "Volunteers at Bletchley Park have recreated a working replica of the electromechanical bombe used to crack the Germans' Enigma encryption. The bombe was designed by Polish cryptologists and refined by Alan Turing and colleagues at Bletchley Park. The replica joins a recreated electronic Colossus — generally considered the first electronic computer. Impressive work when you consider that Winston Churchill ordered the originals to be completely destroyed at the end of WWII."

4 of 131 comments (clear)

Oh no! by cold+fjord · 2006-09-07 05:18 · Score: 5, Funny

Somebody set up us the bombe!

--
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Re:Marian Rejewski by Mahy · 2006-09-07 05:37 · Score: 5, Informative

Turing didn't just wire the thing up: He came up with the approach that allowed them to deal with the plug board.

It is even less well known that Turing's Bombes were unable to solve the 4-wheel Naval Enigma. The 4-wheel Naval Enigma was actually solved by engineers working for NCR in Dayton Ohio, led by Joe Desch. Their contributions were classified until the mid-90s, and so were not well known. See:

1) http://www.daytoncodebreakers.com/
2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Desch
Re:Deserved honour, indeed. by JohnGrahamCumming · 2006-09-07 05:42 · Score: 5, Insightful

Turing's death is a warning about the dangers of discriminating against people because they are different.

For all values of 'different'.

John.
Re:Why? by igb · 2006-09-07 05:53 · Score: 5, Interesting

I'm not sure it's entirely true, anyway. The claim's always made that the reason the British didn't reveal that they'd broken Enigma (in the way in which the Americans rapidly documented the breaks into Red and Purple as soon as the war was over) was that the British were selling Enigma to misguided European powers, advertising it as the German's finest, without revealing they'd broken into it. For this story to make sense, the British would have to have retained the ability to break into Enigma.
It's always rumoured that Collossi were in service at Cheltenham into the sixties, attacking various Fish-style machine baudot-code ciphers. It doesn't seem unreasonable to suggest that a bombe or two were kept as well: with the use of the diagonal board, they were probably faster than an emulation in a computer would have been.
ian