Public Invited to Try Their Luck Against Old Cipher Tech

Stony Stevenson writes to tell us that in celebration of the opening of the National Museum of Computing, members of the public are being challenged to take on a rebuilt version of Colossus, the world's first programmable digital computer. The Cipher Challenge will take two groups of amateur code breakers and pit them against one of the original Lorenz cipher machine used by the German High Command during World War II. "The encrypted teleprinter message will be transmitted by radio from colleagues in Paderborn, Germany, and intercepted at Bletchley Park by the two code-breaking groups, one using modern PCs and the other using the newly rebuilt Colossus Mark II."

A real contest?

[mistersooreams]

The article doesn't explain how 1940s hardware competing with modern hardware is a remotely interesting contest. The reason is that the Collosus machines (Collosi?) were both highly specialised for the task, in that they could not do anything but simulate a Lorentz machine very fast, and of course massively parallel. In particular, Collosus was not Turing-complete, so it could not execute arbitrary programs (in the modern sense) - the honour of first Turing-complete machine usually goes to the ENIAC, although this is hotly disputed. So, this might be an interesting contest, although I would still expect a good modern implementation to win. More information, as always, at Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].

The abacus is greater then the sword

[king-manic]

WWII might have been a great deal more expensive in terms of humans lives, duration, and overall destruction is it wasn't for the people at Bletchley park and their counterparts in the US Army Signals Intelligence Service. It's unfortunate that their contribution remained a secret for so long. Imagine how much damage Yamamoto could have done if his strategies and feints weren't all known to the Americans or if all the German troop movements weren't deduced from their communications.

Re:01000110 01101001 01110010 01110011 01110100 00

[maxwell demon]

I'm obviously reading too much Slashdot: I knew the complete message after interpreting just the first 8 bits in the subject ...

Re:I can only hope that

[antifoidulus]

How is that even remotely on topic? Seriously, can we have at least ONE slashdot story where someone doesn't mention "**AA"(which is a misuse of splats and/or regexes anyway)? This is what happens when a site turns from 'news for nerds" to "message board of the pirate bay" I suppose.....

Re:A real contest?

[rts008]

"The article doesn't explain how 1940s hardware competing with modern hardware is a remotely interesting contest."

Without it being spelled out to me, I am thoroughly taken with this idea. (only true computer geeks need apply, basically)

I think it would be cool to participate in this, but I would especially like to be on the Collosus team just to get to play with this icon of computer geekdom. I suspect that the modern pc's could smoke Collosus (with the right setup), but this gives a chance to gauge our progress, compare apples and oranges like only a comp. geek can, and otherwise rejoice in our geekiness.

So admittedly, this isn't interesting for just anyone-even here on /. , but to some of us, this is just too much fun/interest to pass up.

We see quite a few stories about comparisons between PS3 'super computers' pitted against older supercomputers, we see ad hoc distributed systems compared to older super computers, so why not modern PC's compared to The Super Computer that started it all. (okay, that last bit may have been over the top, and not real accurate...but come on man!)

On the Spock Scale, I rate this one as:
*raised eyebrow*'Fascinating, Captain.'

Re:The abacus is greater then the sword

[initialE]

Isn't it a shame that the treatment of Alan Turing after the war drove him to suicide though, as though all of his contributions meant nothing to the people. All that mattered to them was that he was a homosexual.

Re:The abacus is greater then the sword

[kestasjk]

It's unfortunate that their contribution remained a secret for so long.

At least you didn't take one of your best cryptanalysts and drive them to suicide by forcing them to take hormone injections or go to prison for the crime of being a homosexual, like we did in England. That's one way to treat a war hero.