Rebuilding the Polish Engima-Cracker
looorg writes:
As a master thesis, one Cambridge student rebuilt a copy of the Cyclometer, the Polish Enigma-cracking machine.
http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/news/enigma-code-breaking-machine-rebuilt-cambridge:
Cambridge Engineering alumnus Hal Evans has built a fully-functioning replica of a 1930s Polish cyclometer - an electromechanical cryptologic device that was designed to assist in the decryption of German Enigma ciphertext. The replica currently resides in King's College, Cambridge.
[...] Work on the hardware-based replica began in 2018, as part of Hal's fourth year Master's project under the supervision of King's College Fellow and Senior Tutor Dr Tim Flack. The aim was to investigate further into cryptologist Marian Rejewski's cyclometer - an early forerunner to Cambridge University mathematician Alan Turing's machine, known as the Bombe, which was used to crack the German Enigma code during the Second World War.
Hal said he chose to work on the cyclometer as it was the very first machine used to assist the decryption effort. To his knowledge, the replica is the first fully-functioning hardware-based electromechanical cyclometer to exist since the years preceding the Second World War. The original machines would have been destroyed in 1939 to prevent them from falling into the hands of German invaders.
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