Author
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Topic: The Imitation game
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Paul Adsett
Film God
Posts: 5003
From: USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted January 27, 2015 01:26 PM
What was acheived at Bletchley Park is truly amazing. The German High Command changed the order and numeric settings of the four wheels on the Enigma machine every 24 hours, essentially wiping out any decoding progress made by the British on a daily basis. Even though the British managed to capture an Enigma machine, it was useless for decoding unless you knew the wheel settings used by the Germans for that particular day. Alan Turing designed and built a machine called a Bombe which was essentially an electro-mechanical computer, and it cycled through all the possible combinations of the four wheel settings on the Enigma to determine the ones that enabled a known word or phrase, transmitted by the Germans on that particular day, to make sense. When the wheel settings were determined by the Bombe machine, an actual Enigma machine could be configured to those settings and the full messages for that day could be decoded. The next day, a whole new cobination of the wheel settings had to be determined. The number of mathematical combinations of letter changes by the Enigma machine were 15000,000,000,000,000,000! It would be impossible for one person to decode a single message in a lifetime! The Germans knew that, and that is why they were confident that their Enigma coded messages were secure for the duration of the war. As the movie points out, the Allies had to be very careful not to demonstrate too much success with their code breaking, in case the Gertmans became suspicous and redesigned their Enigma machine. The addition of a couple of more encoding wheels by the Germans would have made the decoding task insurmountable at the time.
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