enigma code

[tali122]

surely the real geniuses were the germans who created such a complicated code - requiring 10000 codebreakers including alan turing to break it?

[Sequin]

They were very clever, but not clever enough - it is harder to crack a code than to set one

[landie]

Ytir, smu ofopy vsm dry s vpfr niy oy yslrd s vzrbrt artdpm yp dpzbr pmr.

[Tim Baxter]

Further to sequin's reply.  If the German comms operators hadn't been stupid by sending an encoded signal and then 'in clear' several times and on other occasions the same text encoded differently then it is doubtful if Enigma could ever have been broken.  This is not to detract from Turing's efforts.

[Cetti]

According to documentaries it was the Germans themselves making mistakes in sending some of the  messages which helped  in de-coding them. So they were'nt that clever.

[landie]

Come on tali122, the 's' is the clue.

[tali122]

landie u r talking in riddles(i havent actually tried to decipher it)

[landie]

My point is that it took two seconds to create the cipher and about 30 seconds to type it. It doesn't take a genius to create such a code, the trick is finding the solution.

That is why the code-breakers were special people with special talent.

[littleoldme]

Not forgetting of course that it was the Enigma machine, not the operators, that created the code. The operator would type in the plain text, while a colleague would dutifully note the letter lamps that would light up as each letter key was pressed. The coded message would then be sent to the recipient who would set his machine to the same settings, and type in the gibberish to be rewarded with the plain German text.

The Enigma machine had been invented in 1919, initially for banking security - what the German forces did was to make it vastly more complicated by greatly increasing the number of possible wheel settings and add a plugboard to transpose pairs of letters further, adding billions more permutations. Turing's greatest achievement of all was to devise a machine - the 'bombe' - that replicated the workings of several pairs of Enigmas to find potential matches between cipher and plain text. After some modification, this proved immensely successful in the early part of the war - only when the U-boats started using an Enigma with four wheels instead of three did it run into trouble.

This is all, of course, a ridiculously simplified overview of how it all worked. :-)