According to the movie “The Imitation Game”, Alan Turing’s created an early computer that figure out the daily code the Germans had. Because the words “weather” and “Heil Hitler” were in every message, they were able to use the computer to break the daily code. Then, from that, Turing used a mathematical formula that would give the Allies as much intelligence from Enigma possible without alerting the Nazis that their code was broken. Fascinating movie.
That’s also how we broke the Japanese code. Some guy on an island broadcasting “Nothing to report” several days in a row
I agree, it is/was a terrific movie. Most interesting how, after we broke the code, we were not aggressive in meeting Nazi actions for fear they might find out what we found out. Same principle is likely in play to this day, leaving in question what is the most effective way to deal with enemies who fancy themselves secretive.
My impression is that the analog computer could have broken the code even without knowing the key words. But it would have taken a super long time to do so. Maybe even years because the those analog computers were so slow. Knowing the key words greatly reduced the amount of time needed to break the codes which were also changed on a regular basis. Which means starting over even if you did break the previous code.
I imagine that with today’s computers then it would be child’s play to break those codes in minutes or seconds even without knowing the existence of key words.
How bad was the movie in terms of excessive focus on Turing’s homosexuality? I thought it would be endless preaching, so I never watched it.
well... that’d do it. same as AF at Midway
but to be fair, those words basically were the codekey...
sans that, well
leave it to the Germans to be so strict as to xmit HH only to have it come back and bite them in the arse