Posts Tagged ‘cryptography’
“The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation”*…
In this age of Alexa and Siri, it’s worth recalling the (long) history of human-machine conversation. At MIT in 1966 an experiment with an early form of artificial intelligence anticipated just how close we might grow with our machines…
Client: Men are all alike.
ELIZA (a computer): In what way
Client: They’re always bugging us about something or other.
ELIZA: Can you think of a specific example
Client: Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
ELIZA: Your boyfriend made you come here
Client: He says I’m depressed much of the time.
ELIZA: I am sorry to hear you are depressed
Client: It’s true. I am unhappy.
ELIZA: Do you think coming here will help you not to be unhappy
Client: I need some help, that much seems certain.
– Joseph Weizenbaum, from a transcription of “Computational Linguistics.”
Named after George Bernard Shaw’s ingénue in Pygmalion, the ELIZA program operated on the Project MAC computer system at MIT and made natural language exchange possible between man and machine. ELIZA identified key words and phrases and responded with rote answers that simulated a conversation.
“Talking Cure,” via Lapham’s Quarterly.
* Michel de Montaigne, The Essays
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As we lie back on the couch, we might note that it was on this date in 1928 that the Enigma Machine encoded its first message.
A simple German machine the size of a portable typewriter, ENIGMA allowed for security in communications by a process in which typed letters were replaced by a cipher text displayed on illuminated lamps. The cipher was symmetrical so entering the cipher text into another ENIGMA reproduced the original message. Security was provided by a set of rotor wheels and a series of patch cables whose arrangement was agreed upon previously.
ENIGMA was used extensively by the German military during World War II to transmit battle plans and other secret information. By December of 1941, however, British codebreakers managed to decipher the code, allowing them to routinely read most ENIGMA traffic.
[source- Computer History Museum]
Coded references…
Readers will recall the role that Alan Turing and the team at Bletchley Park played in cracking the German Enigma code; some analysts and historians reckon that their work may have shortened World War Two by “not less than two years.”
That code was generated by– and thus cracking it turned on deconstructing and understanding– an Enigma Machine.
Understandably, there were few such machines ever built. And equally understandable, those that survive are extremely expensive collectables. But readers need fear not! Now, thanks to our friends at Instructables, one can convert a “Kid’s Game to an Enigma Machine“:
Step-by-step instructions at Instructables.
Readers might also want to visit Cabinet Magazine‘s wonderful “How to Make Anything Signify Anything,” a profile of American code breaker (and code maker) William Friedman:
By the time he retired from the National Security Agency in 1955, Friedman had served for more than thirty years as his government’s chief cryptographer, and—as leader of the team that broke the Japanese PURPLE code in World War II, co-inventor of the US Army’s best cipher machine, author of the papers that gave the field its mathematical foundations, and coiner of the very term cryptanalysis—he had arguably become the most important code-breaker in modern history.
As we reach for our decoder rings, we might recall that it was on this date in 1884 that the states of Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia, with (at least) 50 tornadoes. Known as “The Enigma Outbreak,” it did an estimated a total of $3–4 million in tornado damage (in 1884 dollars; plus an unknown amount of flood and other damage), destroying over 10,000 structures.
Photo: © D. Burgess / NOAA (source)
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