Happy Birthday Alan Turing! How Modern Technology Could Win WWII In 13 Minutes (digitalocean.com) 107
DevNull127 writes: A grateful reporter whose father-in-law liberated a concentration camp after D-Day reports on a high-tech team that "accomplished in 13 minutes what took Alan Turing years to do — and at a cost of just $7."
"In late 2017, at the Imperial War Museum in London, developers applied modern AI techniques to break the 'unbreakable' Enigma machine used by the Nazis to encrypt their correspondences in World War II."
Two Polish co-founders of a company called Enigma Pattern decided to honor Alan Turing's ground-breaking work at Bletchley Park, where Turing had automated the testing of over 15 billion possible passwords each day by building what's considered the first modern computer. They took the problem to a modern cloud infrastructure provider, renting what one describes as "2,000 minions that do the tedious work" — specifically, crunching 41 million combinations each second — using Grimm's Fairy Tales to train an algorithm to recognize when they had found a commonly-used German word (including familiar bedtime stories like Hansel & Gretl and Rumpelstiltskin). "In the end the AI could not understand German. But it did what machine learning does best: recognize patterns."
"After 13 minutes of minion work, boom! The new Bombe had broken the code."
Turing's birthday is Saturday — and it's nice to see him being remembered so fondly.
"In late 2017, at the Imperial War Museum in London, developers applied modern AI techniques to break the 'unbreakable' Enigma machine used by the Nazis to encrypt their correspondences in World War II."
Two Polish co-founders of a company called Enigma Pattern decided to honor Alan Turing's ground-breaking work at Bletchley Park, where Turing had automated the testing of over 15 billion possible passwords each day by building what's considered the first modern computer. They took the problem to a modern cloud infrastructure provider, renting what one describes as "2,000 minions that do the tedious work" — specifically, crunching 41 million combinations each second — using Grimm's Fairy Tales to train an algorithm to recognize when they had found a commonly-used German word (including familiar bedtime stories like Hansel & Gretl and Rumpelstiltskin). "In the end the AI could not understand German. But it did what machine learning does best: recognize patterns."
"After 13 minutes of minion work, boom! The new Bombe had broken the code."
Turing's birthday is Saturday — and it's nice to see him being remembered so fondly.
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The Turing test is failing on slashdot and they celebrate his birthday anyhow.
I'm sure he's very glad of that six feet under.
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given the rabid irrational and irrelevant, response to a valid point, that code breaking had only a minor part in winning the world war two, and as such title displays an ignorant and idiotic mindset, it is quite obvious which of the authors of above two comments have a brain.
readers can judge the relevance of the political affiliations of each likewise, according to their own brain power.
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Thinking a war can be won in 13 minutes because of what
I could have won the Battle of Hastings (and hence the war of the Norman invasion) for the Saxons in less than 13 minutes if I had been there with a machine gun. Was there a point to this excercise?
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I doubt that you could have won the Battle of Hastings in 13 minutes. Mostly because one machine gun isn't going to be significant enough. There were anywhere from 7,000 to 12,000 Norman invaders. Given a fire rate of 400 rounds a minute, which allows for some control, it would take you 17.5 to 30 minutes to kill all the invaders. That's a really optimistic estimate of 100% accuracy and each bullet fired is a kill. There's also the logistics of ammunition weight. I'll use a figure of 24.5gram which matches
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If he had a minigun firing at 6,000 rounds per minute, with an effective range of 1,000 meters, I'd say there's a good chance he could kill enough of them that the rest would flee. They would see their compatriots falling to the ground dead for no apparent reason, accompanied by a strange noise. They'd probably think they were being slaughtered by whatever god they believed in. You definitely wouldn't have to kill the entire army.
Re: Ironic. (Score:2)
We understand that there's more to warfare than cyphers. Your assumption that everyone here is an idiot is irrational, too. That said, code breaking played a critical role in the war.
Wasn't there a movie about that? (Score:2)
The Final Countdown had F-14s having dog fights with Japanese Zeros. Well, maybe not much of a dog fight, but it was fun.
If they stayed, wouldn't the the war been won pretty quickly?
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The Final Countdown had F-14s having dog fights with Japanese
Wasn't that Europe instead?
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It was Japan, and the joke was that the Zero pilots tried hard, but they didn't have a snoball's chance... My favorite line from the flick:
"Splash the Zero..."
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...I am so old that I saw it in a theater... :-)
The Final Countdown is a 1980 alternate history science fiction film about a modern aircraft carrier that travels through time to the day before the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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John Birmingham's "Axis Of Time" trilogy expands on the idea. A failed physics experiment creates a wormhole that transports a modern carrier battle group into the middle of Admiral Spruance's fleet on its way to Midway. Great story.
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Song, yes. Movie setting, no.
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No link, no reference, no hints, no swoosh. Europe the musical group and "Final Countdown" the song came and went quickly. It peaked at #18 and lasted 13 weeks on the Billboard pop chart. I do admit to never being a hair metal fan.... The link you finally deigned to provide in your smugly superior half-assed cultural reference was the only way to recall the song.
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Fuck the billboard pop chart, it was a disco staple for a decade here.
Maybe you're too young, too antisocial or just too forgetful to have got the reference but it was pretty obvious for many of us.
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The Final Countdown had F-14s having dog fights with Japanese Zeros.
I don’t remember that part; but it ended with Moss (AKA “Word”) defeating Negative One in a game of “Street Countdown”.
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It's probably not as big an effect as you might think for two main reasons. The first reason is munitions. The F-14's combat advantage was with missile payload. Once all those missiles were expended there would be no replacements and the plane would be relegated to carrying bombs/torpedoes of the day, assuming they could be fitted to the airframe. The second, and more critical, factor would be fuel. The US military was operating planes that used high octane fuel while the planes the USS Nimitz carried were
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Yeah, dumbest movie ever.
No real admiral is going to throw away the chance to stop Pearl Harbor just because his planes might not make it back. Tell them to sink the Japanese attack fleet and then reroute to Hickam Field if the carrier has returned to the present.
Typical Hollywood idiocy. They don't understand how people in the real world act. They don't know how technology works. They have no understanding of anything outside their own little screwed up lives.
Never Would Have Used It (Score:3, Insightful)
The Germans never would have used such an encryption if modern methods of breaking it existed. So a complete misnomer.
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Annexing Austria, annexing half of Czechoslovakia, invading the other half, invading Poland, invading Holland, invading Belgium, sinking civilian ships, invading Norway, murdering their own citizens, failing to equip their army for a winter war in Russia and banning swing music.
Yeah, I reckon the Germans did a few things wrong.
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Re:Never Would Have Used It (Score:5, Informative)
"a year" was roughly how long it took to develop the Bombe [wikipedia.org]. The Bombe was an important breakthrough in that it automated a tedious step of the decryption.
Enigma decryption was done like this:
1. Cryptanalysts used various techniques to find a crib: a possible plaintext for a section of one message. Weaknesses in Enigma were exploited to find these cribs. A famous one is the fact that an Enigma can't encrypt a letter as itself, which gives an easy way to do an initial test. Operational weaknesses included the German propensity to send predictable messages like "nothing to report" and "wettervorhersage" which provided nice cribs.
2. The crib was converted (by the cryptanalyst) to a menu. The menu was basically a way to tell the Bombe what links there were between the plaintext and ciphertext.
3. The Bombe ran through all possible wheel settings to find settings that exhibited the links in the menu.
4. The Bombe produced one or more wheel settings, these were tried on the whole message. The correct settings could then be used to decrypt all messages for that radio net and that day.
From the article it looks like this "AI" uses German word lists to find cribs, then feeds those in a Bombe equivalent.
Re: Never Would Have Used It (Score:3)
There was more to it and the "standard message" was less of an issue, I think that's a bit of a historic embelishment.
The problem was that certain people not quite as bright got involved with later designs and operation. Eg the pin that moved one wheel one step forward "wasn't enough" so they added a second pin so the rotor moved twice. What this did do is basically change the statistics so it was easier to detect when a rotor ticked a character up.
There were generals that had a high suspicion early on in t
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Well, yes, of course there is more to it. I've read several books that devote a hundred pages or more to the whole process. The most recent one is 'Station X' by Michael Smith. It's full of direct quotes from people who worked at BP, and it includes several references to the 'standard message' technique. So I don't think it's an embellishment.
The 'standard message' is one of the few aspects of the whole decryption effort that is easy to explain to an outsider. I think that explains why it's so often mention
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And the main mistake was to repeat the encryption code at the beginning of the message, to protect against "typing errors", so you knew e.g. that:
XTZUVF
TREGCF
were encrypted by the same code, e.g. MASTER
Further it was most likely that a message sent to a submarine ended in something like:
Heil Hitler!
Good Luck!
Happy Hunting!
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It was less the time it took to work out how to decrypt it, it was working out how to decrypt it with technology support while inventing the new technology providing that support.
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The Germans never would have used such an encryption if modern methods of breaking it existed. So a complete misnomer.
The Germans also would never have surrendered just because the British cracked their Enigma code - so the story is rather silly on several levels, and that title is complete bollocks (to borrow a phrase from our cousins across the pond).
Doesn't matter anyway (Score:2)
Allied forces had to be circumspect on what information they enacted upon. If they anticipated all the German attacks, then they would know it was broken.
Wait, what?? (Score:2)
Whoah, thats actually incredibly fast for the 1940s. I need to learn about his architecture a bit. Hadn't realized how ahead of his time it was as well.
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Prepare to be disappointed because it is not true. They didn't brute force the "passwords" at all. They used a lot of social engineering techniques to guess the decryption of fragments of the message which they would feed into the bombes to extract the rotor settings. For example, if you intercepted a message every morning at 9am from a weather station,, you might guess it contains the word "Wetterbericht"and you could guess where it is in the message by the fact that Enigma would never encrypt a letter as
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Yeah, but that claim "Turing had automated the testing of over 15 billion possible passwords each day" is simply wrong.
A enigma message works like this. Everyone involved knows the MASTERKEY used for the next days, weeks or a month. That key you want to "find".
Then you hear record a few hundred encrypted messages. Which are all encrypted with an individual key, invented/defined by the sender.
So: how does the receiver know the key? Because each message is headed by two repetitions of that key, encrypted by t
Modern Technology more than IT (Score:2)
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Well, since you ask.. No, Germany do not have nuclear ballistic missiles, and yes the UK (and France) do.
Makes the effectiveness of the Leopard tank line pretty fucking irrelevant.
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Towards the end, the Nazi's did have a rudimentary ballistic missile though. You should brush up on your technology history a little bit. Plus, I doubt very much if a "Fat Boy" type device could fit on a V1.
You are implying that the V1 was a ballistic missile. It wasn't - it was a sacrificial pilotless plane, or cruise missile as they are now called. You do not mention the V2 which was a ballistic missile, very advanced for the time as a vehlce, enough to form the technical starting point of the US space program. The V2 was let down by a poor guidance system, even by the standards of the day. The Germans were developing a longer range version of the V2, with a reach to hit the USA with the nuclear bomb they
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Hitler wouldn't be in that kind of bunker in a world where such weapons existed.
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Heh, Hitler considering invading the neighboring France with its 300 nuclear warheads and Daffault Rafale aircraft...and going, naah, I'll just go back to painting.
How many Turings to screw in a lightbulb? (Score:5, Funny)
Only one...which was also enough to screw the Germans.
Faster decryption wouldn't have helped that much (Score:5, Informative)
Bletchley Park's successes were certainly an important factor in the Allied victory. But those successes didn't just depend on quick decryption.
- BP was the first organization to take codebreaking to an industrial scale, and one of the first to experience information overload in a war scenario. They were drowning in radio traffic, and had to make sense of it all for the intel to be of any use.
- BP was one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war. Any Allied operation that was too obviously the result of information the Allies could only have gotten by reading Enigma, would have compromised all of BP's work. The Germans would have switched to new, better coding machines and BP would have been back at square 1. So elaborate measures were taken to provide plausible explanations for how the Allies got their intel. Reconnaissance efforts were directed toward enemy troop concentrations, for example. Sometimes the Allies couldn't use their intel because no plausible explanation could be fabricated in time.
- The Germans occasionally introduced new Enigma variations (the 4-rotor naval and intelligence versions, the steckerboard, new rotors). All BP had to work out how these machines worked, was the encrypted radio messages (and on one memorable occasion, the chance to steal an actual machine from a German U-boot as it sank). It could take months to work out how new rotors were wired.
- Once the bombes were up and running, the time to get the day's settings dropped to a few hours, and it became rare for BP not to break the settings for all major networks before the day was over.
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To be fair, without lend-lease the UK may have had to negotiate peace, which would've given Germany a win over their conquered territories and allowed them to focus their full resources against Russia.
Unsolved Enigma messages? (Score:2)
Quite disappointing, even by today's standards of Slashdot disappointment. Only question I had, and no comment nor the summary of the article had any hint of the answer.
Question: Are there any still uncracked Enigma messages?
I did read that there were a number of still unsolved and unknown Enigma messages as of a few years ago. It certainly seems like we have the capability to brute force them now, but has anyone bothered?
No funny comments either, but that's just par now.
Woah, that's some bull (Score:2)
It's been 15 years since "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq and we are still fighting there. The most likely scenario today would be superpowers defending their own borders and letting Hitler do whatever he wants in the rest of the Europe. People lost this silly notion of fighting and dying to oppose evil. All the tech in the world can't make up for it.
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You can not defeat a small enemy when larger enemies keep feeding in men and materials. We couldn't defeat North Korea because China and Russia sent men and supplies, the same with North Vietnam. Iran and Russia supply insurgents in Iraq plus religious factions fight each other. There can be no victory under those situations.
After the Nazi hierarchy was eliminated the German army surrendered. The few holdouts had no one supplying them. The Japanese people would have fought to the last man, woman, and child
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It could have been possible maybe. In a 20th century history elective in college, our professor had us read one of those "everything you know about ww2 is wrong" books. The author posited that the bulk of what gets into mass media... Patton and the 3rd army, the atomic bombs, The French resistance, the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, the Doolittle raid, MacArthur's island-hopping strategy, the USS Enterprise, the involvement of the various other allied powers, etc... was mostly just miscellanea. Rathe
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Yes, the way I see it, the Germans attacked the Russians in their own land, sapping their strength. If the Germans had tasked competent general officers and manpower to western Europe, the Allied invasion would certainly be slowed dramatically and possibly stopped.
America's logistical contributions are not to be underestimated, though. My mother was a little girl living in Yonkers New York and told me about times when the sky was blackened by flights of B-17s.
Re: But Turing was Teh Ghey (Score:2)
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It could have been possible maybe. In a 20th century history elective in college, our professor had us read one of those "everything you know about ww2 is wrong" books. The author posited that the bulk of what gets into mass media... Patton and the 3rd army, the atomic bombs, The French resistance, the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, the Doolittle raid, MacArthur's island-hopping strategy, the USS Enterprise, the involvement of the various other allied powers, etc... was mostly just miscellanea. Rather, his position was that what won the war was 1/3rd Bletchley Park, 1/3rd American manufacturing, and 1/3rd the previously-mentioned miscellaneous.
The conclusion was that without the US factories, *maybe* the UK could have used Ultra to most effectively utilize its limited resources and still pull off a win. And, without the UK codebreakers, *maybe* the US could have simply constructed so much more war materiel than Germany's and Japan's navies could sink that we'd have eventually just Zerg rushed them and won anyway. But it was the combination of the codebreakers and factories that really secured the allied victory. The argument, especially since more and more about Ultra and Magic that had never been known before was reaching the public eye at the time, was fairly compelling.
The code breaking was important, but the importance is often greatly exaggerated. The code-breakers had relatively little direct impact on the fighting in the Eastern Front, and that was critical to the overall outcome of the war.
The major role of the Allied code-breaking in affecting the Eastern Front was indirect: they help get convoys across the Atlantic. But the Germans had their own code-breakers, and at times they were the one's reading the Allied codes. It wasn't at all a one-sided affair.
Other te
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