Cambridge student rebuilds Polish Enigma-code-breaking box that paved the way for Turing ... and Victory!
- Reference: 1594800070
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/07/15/enigma_cracking_cyclometer_recreated/
- Source link:
Turing famously devised the “bombe”, a machine that was capable of decrypting messages encoded by Nazi Germany’s fiendish Enigma machines. Breaking the Enigma code produced intelligence credited with shortening World War II and saving innumerable lives. Turing’s work on the bombe grew into the digital computers on which you are reading this story.
While Turing has rightly been celebrated, Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski intuited the workings of Enigma and devised machines capable of decrypting Enigma-coded messages. The cyclometer was their first effort and a later project a later “bomba kryptologiczna” was an even better codebreaker.
Rejewski and his colleagues were known to allied intelligence, which recognised the value of their work and kept the team out of Nazi hands. Alan Turing met the team in France to talk crypto in the early months of 1940. The team later moved to Vichy France and later escaped to the UK where they worked at Bletchley Park and Turing again took up their work to produce his own devices.
Masters student Hal Evans is the proto-boffin behind the box, and [1]said that it interested him because it’s previously been reconstructed only as software.
In the video below, Evans shows off the machine and explains its workings.
[2]Youtube Video
Evans believes his replica is the first working or complete Cyclometer in existence since World War II.
“The successes at Bletchley Park are well known in the UK and, while the Polish contribution is certainly acknowledged, I think its exact extent and significance are not widely recognised,” Evans said. “Researching into Rejewski and his colleagues, I wanted to discover more about their efforts, and the more I looked, the more interesting the story became—quite how advanced the Poles were in their understanding of Enigma compared to the British in 1939 is remarkable.” ®
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[1] https://techxplore.com/news/2020-07-enigma-code-breaking-machine-rebuilt-cambridge.html
[2] https://youtu.be/VSO8pGQOXaw
[3] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Well done
This might be the case in the press (rah rah Great Britain awesome rah rah rah), but on the ground at Bletchley and elsewhere, you will find that the Polish collaborators and originators are very much appreciated. It's made clear that they laid the groundwork that Alan Turing built upon.
And yes, here's a glass to the Poles.
Very nice!
Although I can't say that the demo told me anything, other than that lamps may or may not light up, and flicking switches may alter what lights up.
It's a cool thing for sure, but after watching the video I understood nothing about how I would encode a single letter, never mind "Hello World".
Presentation
Good job but I prefer the look of the original. This one needs a bit of a steampunk makeover. (Or cyberpunk. Or WWII punk?)
I was going to ask if anyone knew how it came to be called 'bombe' but I got off my lazy arse and googled it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_(cryptography)
Poles at Bletchley Park
If you do the tour with a guide at Bletchley Park they are very open about the contribution of the Polish team and their achievements before 'Station X' started work on Enigma. There's even a statue of them, which is included in the tour. It's well worth a visit.
Loyalty
Polish heroism, rewarded with duplicitous assurances from the self-serving British government of the day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Polish_military_alliance
I'm sure today's incumbents would treat our continental allies more honourably. Oh, wait....
Re: Loyalty
So when Britain went to war with Germany for over 5 years under that agreement with Poland, we somehow broke it? Although admittedly we didn't also declare war on the Soviet Union - but then the Wiki you linked to is badly written and doesn't make it clear whether the secret part of the treaty limited it to war with Germany or not.
As to our guarantees to Europe, Britain since WWII, has consistently spent more on the defence of NATO than most of the rest of NATO. With exceptions lilke the US and Greece. There were long periods where we spending as much on the defence of Germany as the German government were - inlcuding large committments of troops to the basically suicidal positions near the East German border - who were there as a tripwire to give other NATO members time to mobilise.
Similarly the British army and airforce are currently forward deployed as one of the main forces committed to the defence of the Baltic States (under very real threat of Russian aggression) - a position that it's been hard to get other NATO allies to take up.
I saw a very interesting piece of polling a few months ago. One of those polls of attitudes across Europe. Showing that Trump has dramatically lowered most people's opinions of the US. But what was really interesting was that only 30% of Germans and Italians thought that their governments should abide by the NATO treaty in defence of the Baltic States, but that even with Trump at the helm 60% still thought that the US would.
Britain has been a staunch ally to its NATO partners, committing serious amounts of blood and treaure to doing so.
Re: Loyalty
It's called looking out for our own interests. Don't get all confused and think it's altruism.
Re: Loyalty
anonymous boring coward,
It's a bit of both. We commmitted more to NATO than other NATO members did - out of a combination of policy inertia, self-interest and a sense of obligation.
That's why the relatively smaller scale genocide in the former Yugoslavia eventually led to a military intervention, but the worse one in Rwanda didn't.
how it works
There's more explanation at
http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/news/enigma-code-breaking-machine-rebuilt-cambridge
Well done
A lot of attention has been focused on Alan Turing's work at Bletchley Park, in particular his development of the Bombes that helped the Ultra project so enormously. However very little attention has been focused on the activities of the Polish intelligence services who did so much of the ground work, and who generously handed everything over to the British intelligence services when they released that the Nazi's were going to invade Poland in 1939. This act gave Bletchley Park in general, and Alan Turing in particular, a huge boost in the encryption war that enabled the Allies to get an invaluable pipeline into the Axis activities.
Raising one for all of those Poles who lost their lives in the struggle against Nazism.