![]() Similarly I don't know if you've used a translation application to a language you don't speak, if you've abbreviated, used txtspk, made typos, used a code or are just enciphering a message from somebody else who speaks a completely different set of languages. I could make an assumption based on your forum profile that a ciphertext from you is likely plaintext in German or English but I have no idea if you speak other languages too so my 'dictionary' may have just expanded immensely. That's the difficulty, to automatically check the validity of a solution you have to have some idea of the possible message content. There are sample Enigma cyphertexts and decoding programs for one to try out. (The "crib" is snippets of expected cleartext such as "heil Hitler" or "commander" etc.) There is a LOT of info on these systems available online, for your reading pleasure. Maintaining the alignment of the two tapes was a problem, so they eventually stores the crib electronically, so there was only one tape to deal with. It read the SZ42 cyphertext from punched paper tape at several thousand characters per second, allowing the character stream to slip one character per full pass against the crib tape. As for the SZ42, code-named "tunny" by the British, they had several electromechanical machines before building Colossus, which was part electromechanical with a lot of electronics. This was done in a huge barn-like building in downtown Washington, DC. Once they knew the rotor combination to use, all machines were set up with those rotors and they ran all the machines in parallel to crack all the messages. That took several MINUTES on an all electromechanical bombe (for army Enigma) and about 20 minutes for navy. The NCR-built bombes were set up with all possible rotor combinations (that took something like 26 machines) and would try to crack the correct rotor combination. ![]() Every day at midnight, the Germans changed the order and selection of rotors, and then they were not changed for the rest of the day. The US built several hundred bombes for the cracking effort. Actually, there were two Enigmas, the army Enigma ha 3 rotors, the navy version had 4. A PDP-8 from the 1960's could crack Enigma codes in minutes.
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