Re: Final Fantasy

Nyrath the nearly wise wrote:
> 
> Yes, but sometimes their criticism is justified. <grin>
>
> Case in point: the movie "U-571"
>
> In reality, it was the British that captured the Enigma machine.
Hollywood
> altered "British" to "American" in order to increase the movie's
market share.

	Although of course, Enigma was not solved so much through
capturing
copies as through using computational abilities. The real credit for
cracking Enigma should go to the British cryptographers (and early
computer scientists) in Bletchley Park, who put together the machines
(and tricks) that allowed Enigma to be decrypted.
	This was mostly necessary because Enigma was designed originally
so
that even if an enemy had a copy, they STILL wouldn't be able to crack
the code without knowing the order of the rotors, the initial starting
position of the rotors, and the placement of the steckers (all of which
were changed as often as three times a day). It was a combination of
brute-force computing (testing out EVERY possible combination and
looking for contradictions (ie no letter can EVER map to itself)), and
looking for encryptions of specific common words (einz, ranks, titles,
dates, etc.) and deriving the sequence from them.
	And, of course, equal credit goes to Poland's cryptrographers,
who
first started cracking Enigma messages in 1933, and who gave Britain
their first bombe (as the cracking machines were called) as well as some
vital hints. It is also worth noting that the Polish cryptographers fled
to France after Poland was occupied, and stayed in France (Vichy France)
after the surrender, still intercepting and decrypting German
transmissions, and smuggling out their work.
	The US also helped once Britain had been convinced to give them
some of
the information on cracking Enigma, mostly by mass-producing bombes.
Finding the actual code wheels and Enigma machines helped, but mostly by
cutting down the number of possibilities to be tested (allowing Enigma
messages to be cracked in hours (sometimes) instead of days/weeks).