Wiki image, dontcha know?
Surely you’ve heard of the German Enigma machine and the Allied efforts to crack it during World War II. Well researchers, using a rebuilt Colossus machine (yup, that’s it right there), wanted to see how fast they could crack similar codes, only they made it into a contest. They invited amateur coders to see who could crack the code first: a giant, code-cracking machine or some programmer with a bunch of time on his hands.
The programmer won.
A German programmer, Joachim Schüth, successfully intercepted the intended radio signal and cracked it in less than two hours. The rebuilt Colossus took three hours and 15 minutes to accomplish the same task.
Maybe Schüth can tell me why CG’s server goes down for a few minutes seemingly every day?
German amateur code breaker defeats Colossus [The Register]
it goes down because you have a bad server. Just get a new one that doesn’t go down so often so that we can read you more often. *mutter-dip shit-mutter*
Actually, that’s Tony Snow (white shirt) in the picture. He’s the last surviving member of the original Colossus team as I recall. And the picture only shows about 1/5 or less of what Colossus is – there is actually about 4 or time more rows of racks. And the row shown only has about half the number racks of tubes that the other rows have. Behind Tony is a paper loop contraption – I think the paper runs at something like 100 mph.
The amazing thing is not that some amateur hacker beat at 1940’s “supercomputer”. The amazing thing is that 1940’s computer scientists and cryptanalysts were able to put the capabilities of an amateur (c. 2007) hacker in a cathode tubes and paper tape based “computer”.