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
This question reminds me of a story of Afghanistan after 9/11. Osama bin Laden was putting out videos, and at one point an American geologist recognized the rock Osama was standing in front of. It was a particular type of stone only found in one part of the country — in other words, he knew where Osama was filming the videos.
So he contacts the U.S. government and lets them know. The military was all “Awesome! We’ll be able to catch him!”
The dude is so happy his very specialized knowledge was so useful that he did what any red blooded American in that situation would do: he *bragged about it on the Internet*.
Thousands of Intel experts cried out in anguish, the fell silent (again).
The next video from bin Laden, he’s standing in front of a tarp, because apparently the Taliban has Internet access.
We were able to keep the secret in WWII because there was no Internet, and people weren’t self-aggrandizing morons.
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