Slashdot Mirror
Happy Birthday Alan Turing! How Modern Technology Could Win WWII In 13 Minutes (digitalocean.com)
DevNull127 writes: A grateful reporter whose father-in-law liberated a concentration camp after D-Day reports on a high-tech team that "accomplished in 13 minutes what took Alan Turing years to do — and at a cost of just $7."
"In late 2017, at the Imperial War Museum in London, developers applied modern AI techniques to break the 'unbreakable' Enigma machine used by the Nazis to encrypt their correspondences in World War II."
Two Polish co-founders of a company called Enigma Pattern decided to honor Alan Turing's ground-breaking work at Bletchley Park, where Turing had automated the testing of over 15 billion possible passwords each day by building what's considered the first modern computer. They took the problem to a modern cloud infrastructure provider, renting what one describes as "2,000 minions that do the tedious work" — specifically, crunching 41 million combinations each second — using Grimm's Fairy Tales to train an algorithm to recognize when they had found a commonly-used German word (including familiar bedtime stories like Hansel & Gretl and Rumpelstiltskin). "In the end the AI could not understand German. But it did what machine learning does best: recognize patterns."
"After 13 minutes of minion work, boom! The new Bombe had broken the code."
Turing's birthday is Saturday — and it's nice to see him being remembered so fondly.
"In late 2017, at the Imperial War Museum in London, developers applied modern AI techniques to break the 'unbreakable' Enigma machine used by the Nazis to encrypt their correspondences in World War II."
Two Polish co-founders of a company called Enigma Pattern decided to honor Alan Turing's ground-breaking work at Bletchley Park, where Turing had automated the testing of over 15 billion possible passwords each day by building what's considered the first modern computer. They took the problem to a modern cloud infrastructure provider, renting what one describes as "2,000 minions that do the tedious work" — specifically, crunching 41 million combinations each second — using Grimm's Fairy Tales to train an algorithm to recognize when they had found a commonly-used German word (including familiar bedtime stories like Hansel & Gretl and Rumpelstiltskin). "In the end the AI could not understand German. But it did what machine learning does best: recognize patterns."
"After 13 minutes of minion work, boom! The new Bombe had broken the code."
Turing's birthday is Saturday — and it's nice to see him being remembered so fondly.
The Final Countdown had F-14s having dog fights with Japanese Zeros. Well, maybe not much of a dog fight, but it was fun.
If they stayed, wouldn't the the war been won pretty quickly?
Fight Spammers!
The Germans never would have used such an encryption if modern methods of breaking it existed. So a complete misnomer.
Whoah, thats actually incredibly fast for the 1940s. I need to learn about his architecture a bit. Hadn't realized how ahead of his time it was as well.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Modern technology includes thermonuclear missiles. One of those on Hitler's bunker and the entire thing would be over in a lot less than 13 minutes.
The Turing test is failing on slashdot and they celebrate his birthday anyhow.
I'm sure he's very glad of that six feet under.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
It could have been possible maybe. In a 20th century history elective in college, our professor had us read one of those "everything you know about ww2 is wrong" books. The author posited that the bulk of what gets into mass media... Patton and the 3rd army, the atomic bombs, The French resistance, the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, the Doolittle raid, MacArthur's island-hopping strategy, the USS Enterprise, the involvement of the various other allied powers, etc... was mostly just miscellanea. Rather, his position was that what won the war was 1/3rd Bletchley Park, 1/3rd American manufacturing, and 1/3rd the previously-mentioned miscellaneous.
The conclusion was that without the US factories, *maybe* the UK could have used Ultra to most effectively utilize its limited resources and still pull off a win. And, without the UK codebreakers, *maybe* the US could have simply constructed so much more war materiel than Germany's and Japan's navies could sink that we'd have eventually just Zerg rushed them and won anyway. But it was the combination of the codebreakers and factories that really secured the allied victory. The argument, especially since more and more about Ultra and Magic that had never been known before was reaching the public eye at the time, was fairly compelling.
Imagine all the people...
Only one...which was also enough to screw the Germans.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Yes, the way I see it, the Germans attacked the Russians in their own land, sapping their strength. If the Germans had tasked competent general officers and manpower to western Europe, the Allied invasion would certainly be slowed dramatically and possibly stopped.
America's logistical contributions are not to be underestimated, though. My mother was a little girl living in Yonkers New York and told me about times when the sky was blackened by flights of B-17s.
Bletchley Park's successes were certainly an important factor in the Allied victory. But those successes didn't just depend on quick decryption.
- BP was the first organization to take codebreaking to an industrial scale, and one of the first to experience information overload in a war scenario. They were drowning in radio traffic, and had to make sense of it all for the intel to be of any use.
- BP was one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war. Any Allied operation that was too obviously the result of information the Allies could only have gotten by reading Enigma, would have compromised all of BP's work. The Germans would have switched to new, better coding machines and BP would have been back at square 1. So elaborate measures were taken to provide plausible explanations for how the Allies got their intel. Reconnaissance efforts were directed toward enemy troop concentrations, for example. Sometimes the Allies couldn't use their intel because no plausible explanation could be fabricated in time.
- The Germans occasionally introduced new Enigma variations (the 4-rotor naval and intelligence versions, the steckerboard, new rotors). All BP had to work out how these machines worked, was the encrypted radio messages (and on one memorable occasion, the chance to steal an actual machine from a German U-boot as it sank). It could take months to work out how new rotors were wired.
- Once the bombes were up and running, the time to get the day's settings dropped to a few hours, and it became rare for BP not to break the settings for all major networks before the day was over.
Allied forces had to be circumspect on what information they enacted upon. If they anticipated all the German attacks, then they would know it was broken.
..........FULL STOP.
I think that analysis is too conspiratorial. First is that the US production capability is commonly mentioned as one of the things that won the war. Secondly the use of radar and other antisubmarine techniques enabled the allies to create a safe corridor from America to England, even without breaking codes. In the Pacific, Japan had no chance against the vastly superior western manufacturing capability. Even if they had somehow won at Midway, they would have been inexhorably pushed back, as the Zero became obsolete. Pearl Harbor was aggressive but most of the ships they sunk were repaired. In Europe, you have to look at what happened during the Battle of Britain without the codebreaking techniques. Would England still have gained air superiority? I don't know the answer to that.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
given the rabid irrational and irrelevant, response to a valid point, that code breaking had only a minor part in winning the world war two, and as such title displays an ignorant and idiotic mindset, it is quite obvious which of the authors of above two comments have a brain.
readers can judge the relevance of the political affiliations of each likewise, according to their own brain power.
Around the time of the Z3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Quite disappointing, even by today's standards of Slashdot disappointment. Only question I had, and no comment nor the summary of the article had any hint of the answer.
Question: Are there any still uncracked Enigma messages?
I did read that there were a number of still unsolved and unknown Enigma messages as of a few years ago. It certainly seems like we have the capability to brute force them now, but has anyone bothered?
No funny comments either, but that's just par now.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Thinking a war can be won in 13 minutes because of what
I could have won the Battle of Hastings (and hence the war of the Norman invasion) for the Saxons in less than 13 minutes if I had been there with a machine gun. Was there a point to this excercise?
To be fair, without lend-lease the UK may have had to negotiate peace, which would've given Germany a win over their conquered territories and allowed them to focus their full resources against Russia.
We understand that there's more to warfare than cyphers. Your assumption that everyone here is an idiot is irrational, too. That said, code breaking played a critical role in the war.
Lets have a re-do or WWII, banning anything invented by homosexuals
Well, since that includes the Nazi Party, it pretty much makes the whole war go away..
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It's been 15 years since "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq and we are still fighting there. The most likely scenario today would be superpowers defending their own borders and letting Hitler do whatever he wants in the rest of the Europe. People lost this silly notion of fighting and dying to oppose evil. All the tech in the world can't make up for it.
It could have been possible maybe. In a 20th century history elective in college, our professor had us read one of those "everything you know about ww2 is wrong" books. The author posited that the bulk of what gets into mass media... Patton and the 3rd army, the atomic bombs, The French resistance, the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, the Doolittle raid, MacArthur's island-hopping strategy, the USS Enterprise, the involvement of the various other allied powers, etc... was mostly just miscellanea. Rather, his position was that what won the war was 1/3rd Bletchley Park, 1/3rd American manufacturing, and 1/3rd the previously-mentioned miscellaneous.
The conclusion was that without the US factories, *maybe* the UK could have used Ultra to most effectively utilize its limited resources and still pull off a win. And, without the UK codebreakers, *maybe* the US could have simply constructed so much more war materiel than Germany's and Japan's navies could sink that we'd have eventually just Zerg rushed them and won anyway. But it was the combination of the codebreakers and factories that really secured the allied victory. The argument, especially since more and more about Ultra and Magic that had never been known before was reaching the public eye at the time, was fairly compelling.
The code breaking was important, but the importance is often greatly exaggerated. The code-breakers had relatively little direct impact on the fighting in the Eastern Front, and that was critical to the overall outcome of the war.
The major role of the Allied code-breaking in affecting the Eastern Front was indirect: they help get convoys across the Atlantic. But the Germans had their own code-breakers, and at times they were the one's reading the Allied codes. It wasn't at all a one-sided affair.
Other technologies such as radar, improved sonar, escort carriers, and specialized sub-killing weapons played a key role in the Battle of the Atlantic as well, it wasn't just code-breaking. It eventually reached a point where it really didn't matter if the Germans knew where the convoys were, because the Allied escorts were so much better at finding and killing the Germans subs than the subs were at escaping (and that was independent of the code breaking, which at best might give a rough location for some of the subs - and radio direction finding could do this independent of the code breaking).
The same, incidentally, was not true for the Japanese: they were far less effective at killing Allied subs. They didn't have the same advanced technology in this area. They had plenty of other advanced technology, but convey escort wasn't something they invested sufficiently in - which ended up being a catastrophic mistake.
But even considering only the battle of the Atlantic is misleading. During the long days of the Arctic summer, in the early war, the Allies couldn't ship much to the Soviet Union - at that point in the war it was too easy for surface, air, and submarine assets to kill ships, and daylight made it easy to find the ships. So the Allies ended up developing other techniques for getting goods to the Soviet Union.
A lot the essential items went on Soviet-flag ships directly from the USA. Since the Japanese were at peace with the Soviets, they didn't interfere with this traffic, so long as it was industrial items, food, clothing, etc and not actual warplanes or tanks - but the goods shipped were nevertheless critical to the Soviet war effort - they fed and clothed the Red Army, helped build the weapons and ammunition, and kept the Red Air Force operational.
The Allies also build a network of air bases in the Northern USA and Canada to fly combat aircraft to the Soviet Union. The American P-39 fighter (and variants) was popular with Soviet pilots and would be used from 1942 to the very end of the war - accounting for more enemy aircraft killed than any other US-made plane.
Finally, with a major effort the Allies built a railroad in the Middle East to move supp
I doubt that you could have won the Battle of Hastings in 13 minutes. Mostly because one machine gun isn't going to be significant enough. There were anywhere from 7,000 to 12,000 Norman invaders. Given a fire rate of 400 rounds a minute, which allows for some control, it would take you 17.5 to 30 minutes to kill all the invaders. That's a really optimistic estimate of 100% accuracy and each bullet fired is a kill. There's also the logistics of ammunition weight. I'll use a figure of 24.5gram which matches 7.62x51mm ammunition. That would mean between 171,500 grams and 294,000 grams of ammunition. For those that need a conversion of kg to pound that's about 380 to 650 pounds, again assuming 100% accuracy. The typical effective engagement range for your machine gun is going to be around 300 meters. Beyond that, you'll miss more than you hit. An average human runs at around 22 miles per hour so I'll knock this down to 15 miles per hour to account for equipment (I'm ignoring the cavalry/archer component of the Norman army). This is equivalent to 6.7 meters per second.
This gives you a scant 45 seconds before the Norman infantry collides with you. Congratulations on killing less than 300 Norman invaders. You most likely didn't cause a rout. You die as the Normans hack you limb from limb. The Normans still probably win.
The point to his comment is to paint the appropriate context of the Enigma machine. While the cracking the Enigma did provide the Allies with crucial information that did help in many cases it didn't "win" the war by any metric. Information can't win anything. All it can do is better position you to take advantage of a situation. It's a tool, nothing more.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
If he had a minigun firing at 6,000 rounds per minute, with an effective range of 1,000 meters, I'd say there's a good chance he could kill enough of them that the rest would flee. They would see their compatriots falling to the ground dead for no apparent reason, accompanied by a strange noise. They'd probably think they were being slaughtered by whatever god they believed in. You definitely wouldn't have to kill the entire army.