Comments on: Bletchley Park rebuilds the bombes -- code crackers that won the war

By: Takuan

Takuan — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

kind of wish a British anti-surveillance underground would name itself “Turing’s Children”

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Can I request Turing’s Eromenoi instead?

By: TroofSeeker

TroofSeeker — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

3 points here:
1.) I can not believe how so many of you know so much about what seems to be an obscure little sidebar detail of WWII, an occurance that probably pre-dates all of you. Not to diminish the significance of code breaking- I’m saying I stand in awe of your knowledge of this (and lots of other) stuff.

2.) fltndboat: “#34 None of which floats.”
A sore subject for you, I suppose. When do we get to see your flattened boat? And

3.) Antinuous, does the cat in the sink have to be alive?

By: Takuan

Takuan — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Bletchley bombe boffins badly beat Boche brains!

By: Takuan

Takuan — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

eww!

By: arkizzle

arkizzle — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tHvVqeWPF8

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I believe that the creation of the Bombe effectively shortened WW2 by s couple of years!

By: fltndboat

fltndboat — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Please continue to evolve. I trust our children. I believe our children are smarter, more wisdom filled, and mentally more proficient than the generation ahead of them. Any generation ahead of them. I can’t think of a healthier attitude toward them for maturation and trust in themselves. Support from their elders is best served by looking up to them, Instead of looking down on them.

By: ndrummond

ndrummond — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Just a note for those unfamiliar with the counterpart effort in the United States; (and a plug for my hometown, Dayton, Ohio!) the US also produced a derivative design of the Polish bombe- it was refined and semi-mass produced (around 100+ bombes) in Dayton, Ohio by the National Cash Register Corporation (NCR); the effort was led by NCR Engineer Joe Desch. A description of this effort in greater detail has been published under the title of “Dayton Codebreakers” (on Amazon, both in book and a 1-hour documentary film) and a short description on Wikipedia at: http://en.wikipedia.org
/wiki/United_States_Naval_Computing_Machine_Laboratory

This isn’t to minimize the effort of the British or Polish work; just to inform readers that the US was also able to contribute to the brute-force effort of codebreaking by manufacturing the bombe’s (Britain’s effort to make the Bombe’s suffered from material and engineering design shortages)

By: etmthree

etmthree — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Anyone up for rebuilding Colossus now?

By: TheCrawNotTheCraw

TheCrawNotTheCraw — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

And let’s not forget the contribution of Alan Turing…and his fate.

Even today, we are reminded of his contributions to everyday computer science by “Captcha”s.

By: fltndboat

fltndboat — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I apologize. My previous post was meant for the string two up from this one. Same stuff tho.

By: mcmrbt

mcmrbt — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

My grandfather worked at Bletchley Park during the war, and went to his grave without ever revealing what he did there.

By: synocrat

synocrat — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

That’s odd, not a single mention of Alan Turing in a post about Bletchley and Enigma? For shame Cory, what are you now, Fox News? :P

By: Telecustard

Telecustard — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I love Boing Boing. For two days I’ve been playing with the most excellent Enigma simulator at

http://users.telenet.be/d.rijmenants/

and then Cory posts this. It’s like you read my mind.

Oh yeah, there’s a Colossus rebuild project too, Etmthree:

http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/lorenz/rebuild.htm

By: fltndboat

fltndboat — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Three in a row is probably going to get me expelled. What happened with your guest blogger comments? I started there and suspect a rookie . Please assure him that public discloser is a brutal process. Loving your brain has to be one of the first causalities in evolving. The rest is just Loving stuff.

By: arkizzle

arkizzle — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

TheCrawNotTheCraw

Indeed, BB is not a place that forgets Turing. A lot of us are outright fans, and the rest just don’t realize they are.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/2686054673/in/photostream/

By: Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Turing didn’t work on the bombes – that was the Polish crypto team. Turing worked on Colossus, and if you read to the end of the post, you’ll find that I’ve blogged rather a lot about Turing, Colossus and Bletchley.

By: Dedalus

Dedalus — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

ya i was gonna mention that too – but couldnt figure out how to send a message directly to a moderator

By: arkizzle

arkizzle — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Dedalus

Either the Moderation Thread or antinous [at] boingboing.net :)

By: Ian Holmes

Ian Holmes — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Cory, you’re wrong, Turing designed the Bombe. Google for refs.

By: fltndboat

fltndboat — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

#31. Don’t bother. Connecting in cyberspace is like a popcorn fart. Moderators occupy a position. The position soon becomes a drag. The nearest stand in becomes your best friend. Authorizing postings to your Dog works . The new game is in trying to figure out the species of Dog that is the stand in. I think boingboing is partial to yappey little fluffballs. Good recipes abound on how to cook dogs. Problem is they got no meat on em.

By: Ian Holmes

Ian Holmes — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

(The Polish mathmos used group theory to crack Enigma, but I don’t believe they ever built any machines. In fact they were never even told that Bletchley existed…)

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

E-mailing me is the best way to deal with urgent issues. That way, I’ll hear it ding if I’m over at XTube or Cats In Sinks.

By: fltndboat

fltndboat — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

#34 None of which floats.

By: Takuan

Takuan — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

http://www.catsinsinks.com/

By: fltndboat

fltndboat — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Ding.

By: djn

djn — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m fairly sure the Polish team built some early hardware.

By: Roy Trumbull

Roy Trumbull — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Polish team copied an enigma and got it to the Brits.
The bombes couldn’t keep up with the possible encode combinations of the improved enigma machines. But the Germans did some really dumb things. There was always a preamble noting awards and promotions that was common to all daily transmissions. If they broke the low level code sent to picket ships in the north Atlantic they had a leg up breaking the enigma coded message due to the common text.
Turing needed delay lines to use results for logical adds etc. They were glass tubes with a mixture of water and alcohol. A ministry developed a technical spec for the liquid to give to potential vendors. Turing was using gin right out of the bottle. My kind of guy.

By: Ian Holmes

Ian Holmes — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I stand corrected, DJN. The Poles did build some machines: cyclometers, perforated-sheet apparatus and, yes, “bombas”:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma#Cyclometer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_(cryptography)

However, Turing did design the British bombe (at least the theoretical concepts; the engineering was done by Harold Keen).