Eli5 how did the allies in ww2 decipher German enigma if there were millions of possibilities for letters and it was being changed every day?
In: 14
Enigma had two flaws and the Allies had one advantage.
The first flaw was design. Enigma could encode a letter as any other letter except itself. So a “H” could never be encoded as an “H” in the message.
The second flaw was human. The Germans would end most messages with “Heil Hitler”.
So if you know the message ends with the same two words every time. And you know the starting code can’t code for itself. You have a pretty good place to start cracking.
It still would take thousands of thousands of computations to decipher it. So this is the Allies advantage. Allen Turing invented a computer to do all those calculations. It could in a few hours solve what would take a team of mathematicians months to do on paper.
Latest Answers