Reply to post: Re: Tutte Tutte

Royal Mail's Colossus move gets ex-WREN's stamp of approval

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Re: Tutte Tutte

The most important one was encrypted twice, using the same key, but with slight changes to the plaintext - that's what enabled Bill Tutte to work out the nature of the Lorenz system.

There was only one message like that. John Tiltman originally decrypted it, and Bill Tutte used it, in one of the greatest intellectual feats of WWII, to determine the workings of the Lorenz machine which was, in effect, a mechanical pseudo random number generator. Tutte also devised a methodology to decrypt the messages, but it was beyond what could be done manually.Max Newman had the idea to use electronics for the task and Tommy Flowers built the machine to do it. Turing had some input to the process, but it was those three, who got little or no recognition, who did the actual job.

Read "Colossus" by B. Jack Copeland and others for the full story.

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