Enigma-Cracking Bombe Recreated 131
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."
Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Marian Rejewski (Score:5, Interesting)
It was actually Marian Rejewski who designed the Cryptologic bomb [wikipedia.org]. Bomba being the polish word for Bomb.
Turing developed the Electro-Mechanical Bomb which was capable of cracking the more sophisticated versions of the Enigma code.
It's well worth taking a trip to Bletchley Park if you get the opportunity.
It's more than just code breaking. It covers the whole history of computing.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
tick tick tick (Score:4, Interesting)
Hopefully they'll do more than just display it. I would love to hear the ticking sound of one running. (Incidentally, that's where the name "bombe" comes from.)
Re:Deserved honour, indeed. (Score:5, Interesting)
Wasn't Conrad Zuse first? (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/zuse.html [idsia.ch]
Not your fault (Score:4, Interesting)
Babbage got suprisingly generous funding, but unfortunately he was ahead of his time in another way -- he practiced feature creep. He kept redesigning while the machine was being built, which is part of the reason he needed such generous funding.
Re:Deserved honour, indeed. (Score:4, Interesting)
I am currently reading "Alan Turing: The Enigma" (http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/), and while I am not much for biographies, it is pretty good so far. It is quite long and detailed, but I am anxious to get through it. The foreword is by one of my favorite authors, Douglas Hofstadter. Can't wait to get his new book in 2007.
If you are a geek, read Godel Escher Bach, and The Mind's I. And if you really want to tackle something, try Metamagical Themas. It's like a good hot sauce - tasty, yet painful, leaving you wanting more. :)
Re:Marian Rejewski (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:tick tick tick (Score:3, Interesting)
The recerated design came from engineers notes (illegally retained) and a few photographs.
The phrase 'I am not worthy' comes to mind...
A true shame is the way Bletchley Park is treated (Score:5, Interesting)
But they need financial help to keep the place running. Parts of the place really need financial investment - the Huts where the code breaking happened are barely standing. They've had to sell off some of the land around the house to developers (who are building a housing estate) to pay for the upkeep. Some of the volunteers were going round interviewing people who'd worked there during the war, they were so short of money that once they'd transcribed the interviews, they'd tape over the recordings and use the same tape again in the next interview to save money on buying new audio tapes.
If you think the work carried out at Bletchley Park during the war was valuable, or fascinating, contribute to keeping the place running as a museum. Visit the place! Buy some cool stuff from the shop! send them a donation! Please.
Machines? We don't need no steenkin' machines (Score:3, Interesting)
Arne Carl-August Beurling (February 3, 1905 - November 20, 1986) was a mathematician and professor of mathematics at Uppsala University (1937-1954) and later at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, USA.
In 1940 he single-handedly deciphered and reverse-engineered an early version of the Geheimfernschreiber (one of the "Fish cyphers") used by Nazi Germany, and created a device that enabled Sweden to decipher German teleprinter traffic passing through Sweden from Norway on a cable. In this way, Swedish authorities knew about Operation Barbarossa before it occurred. This became the foundation for the Swedish Swedish National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA). (The cypher in the Geheimfernschreiber is generally considered to be more complex than the cypher used in the Enigma machines.)