- "Replica Bombe at Bletchley Park", Geograph
"In the course of a day, the Germans enciphered many messages and sent them out in Morse code... then picked up and recorded these wireless messages"
-Lee A. Gladwin, 1997
"He [Turing] came up with what he ending up calling the Bombe. It was basically an electro-mechanical computer which was a special purpose computer you could say because it only solved the problem of decrypting the Enigma Machine. |
Idea
"Alan Turing's concept of "mechanical intelligence" began with a jog in the English countryside early in the summer of 1935. Resting in a meadow, Turing pondered whether a machine might be so designed as to determine the "provability of any mathematical assertion presented to it." |
"Bombe in operation", Bletchley Park
"The first machine was built by the Poles and was a hand operated multiple Enigma Machine. When a possible soultion reached, a part would fall off the machine onto the floor with a loud noise. |
"The defect of Turing's original design was that it depended upon the identification of closed loops and did not take advantage of nonloop associations that might be found. Gordon Welchman, working independently in a converted school on the grounds of Bletchley Park, solved these problems with his Diagonal Board. It allowed for the testing and elimination of all possible plugboard settings for the given positions in one pass" |
"...it’s a machine that is set up according to certain knowledge about an encrypted message, including a “guess” as to what part of the message might say. The machine tries out a number of possible settings in quick succession to find a candidate for what might work. It tries out different positions in the message at the same time, and if all of the positions it tries seem to fit the “guess” it stops and indicates some settings for an Enigma machine. Someone then goes away and checks them to see if they actually work."
- Thomas Briggs (Interview), 2018
Enigma's Flaw
Enigma's flaw was "a letter never becomes itself".
Dr. James Grime, c.2013, Numberphile