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Bletchley Park has a commemorative plaque for the Polish mathematicians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bletchley_Park#/media/File:Bp-polish-codebreakers-plaque

Bletchley Park has a commemorative plaque for the Polish mathematicians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bletchley_Park#/media/File:Bp-polish-codebreakers-plaque.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bletchley_Park#/media/File:Bp-... If you are the slightest bit interested in codebreaking, visiting Bletchley Park is an absolute delight. I cannot recommend it highly enough. The tech is still impressive today, and even more impressive is the human side of it. The huts are still there (mostly) and a few have be renovated so you can tour them. There's also the National Museum of Computing right next door with a replica Colossus machine. You can watch a number of demos and tours on Youtube, but seeing a Bombe machine decrypt your own Enigma encoded message in person is pretty impressive.

tialaramex 4y ago
NB: Worth checking (I think I've managed to get this wrong twice so far!) whether both the Bletchley Park museum and the National Museum of Computing are open, since their opening times don't always overlap well. We actually took a day trip with a team I had at a previous employer to see the NMC, but turned out it was closed, the Bletchley Park museum is cool, and we needed to see the plaque you mentioned because that team had several Polish people who were integral to our success (hi Monika if you're reading!), but we specifically intended to look at the NMC because it's a team of software engineers, so that was a little disappointing. A Bombe doesn't exactly "decrypt" messages. What happens is the bombes are eliminating impossible settings. So you put in a message, and a guess about part of what it says, and the Bombe tries keys, rather like brute forcing a password. "ABCDE, No. ABCED, No, ABDEC, No" and so on. The way Enigma works makes it possible to rule out some keys if you guessed part of the message. When it can't eliminate a key, the machine stops, "CABDE... Maybe". A team of mostly women would try these "stops". Maybe CABDE produces gibberish, the machine is set running again, next is "DEABC" and this produces a message that looks like human text, send it to the German translators in another hut. [ The actual keys in Enigma are not five ASCII letters ]

tialaramex 4y ago

NB: Worth checking (I think I've managed to get this wrong twice so far!) whether both the Bletchley Park museum and the National Museum of Computing are open, since their opening times don't always overlap well. We actually took a day trip with a team I had at a previous employer to see the NMC, but turned out it was closed, the Bletchley Park museum is cool, and we needed to see the plaque you mentioned because that team had several Polish people who were integral to our success (hi Monika if you're reading!), but we specifically intended to look at the NMC because it's a team of software engineers, so that was a little disappointing. A Bombe doesn't exactly "decrypt" messages. What happens is the bombes are eliminating impossible settings. So you put in a message, and a guess about part of what it says, and the Bombe tries keys, rather like brute forcing a password. "ABCDE, No. ABCED, No, ABDEC, No" and so on. The way Enigma works makes it possible to rule out some keys if you guessed part of the message. When it can't eliminate a key, the machine stops, "CABDE... Maybe". A team of mostly women would try these "stops". Maybe CABDE produces gibberish, the machine is set running again, next is "DEABC" and this produces a message that looks like human text, send it to the German translators in another hut. [ The actual keys in Enigma are not five ASCII letters ]