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Public Invited to Try Their Luck Against Old Cipher Tech

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the squeamish-ossifrage dept.

Stony Stevenson writes to tell us that in celebration of the opening of the National Museum of Computing, members of the public are being challenged to take on a rebuilt version of Colossus, the world's first programmable digital computer. The Cipher Challenge will take two groups of amateur code breakers and pit them against one of the original Lorenz cipher machine used by the German High Command during World War II. "The encrypted teleprinter message will be transmitted by radio from colleagues in Paderborn, Germany, and intercepted at Bletchley Park by the two code-breaking groups, one using modern PCs and the other using the newly rebuilt Colossus Mark II."

2 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. Re:A real contest? by NeoSkink · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Z3 beat ENIAC by a couple of years.

    http://www.zib.de/zuse/Inhalt/Kommentare/Html/0684/universal2.html

  2. Re:A real contest? by McSnarf · · Score: 3, Interesting
    *The article doesn't explain how 1940s hardware competing with modern hardware is a remotely interesting contest.*

    I had the luck to visit the Bletchley Park facility earlier this year. (Are you a True Geek? Do the same. They need the money and I mean that.)

    That piece of '40s hardware might look like a crossbreed of a Wells time machine and a phone exchange, but it was (the replica is) incredibly fast. At one very specific task only, solving one of a class of problems. Do not overestimate the speed of a modern PC - it is kept back by years and years of inefficient programming. The people working on Colossus were Real Programmers of the first order (no quiche!). I'd expect the race to be pretty close.