Sunday, February 26, 2006

Wrapped in a riddle

Slashdot has reported on a project to decode three original Enigma messages intercepted in 1942. The method employed is, of course, brute force distributed computing, combined with statistical methods and some clever optimization tricks.

I had thought that the Enigma had been completely unraveled; as it turns out, even with today's computers, very sophisticated computational tools are required to answer some of its questions.

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