How did they get over the catch-22 that if they used the information that Nazis could guess it came from breaking the code but if they didn’t use the information there was no point in having it.
EDIT. I tagged this as mathematics because the movie suggests the use of mathematics, but does not explain how you use mathematics to do it (it’s a movie!). I am wondering for example if they made a slight tweak to random search patterns so that they still looked random but “coincidentally” found what we already knew was there. It would be extremely hard to detect the difference between a genuinely random pattern and then almost genuinely random pattern.
In: Mathematics
As others have stated, if they used every piece of info they received to make decisions, the Nazis would have caught on quickly. Basically, they had to only act on the most vital information and act such that it appears the information could’ve been gathered differently or the response to an attack, for example, was just a coincidence.
If you’re interested, there’s a whole scene in the movie The Imitation Game where the characters argue about this. Essentially the discussion was: “Sure, we could do a lot if we crack the code, but if we do too much, it’ll be obvious and they’ll change how the code works. We have to be careful how we use the information, even if lives are at stake, for the greater war effort and to save more lives.”
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