Whilst last weeks post was all about attending a conference, this weeks post is about things I am doing ready for the upcoming Histocrypt at Oxford and Bletchley. I’d like to take a different approach and introduce some of the programs and videos I’ve been watching.
Codebreaker: The Alan Turing Story
This is a gem of a docudrama available on Amazon Prime. What I liked about it was the mix of interviews with people who knew Turing in both a personal relationship and also as a professional with their time at Bletchley. The acting and use of psychoanalysis sessions are a good platform with the drama and decent acting on all parts involved. I found myself watching this several times over picking over the names and events. This docudrama gives a less ‘dramatized’ impression of Alan Turing as seen in the Imitation game (not a bad film), and I can recommend watching this if you have access to amazon prime or Youtube.
If I to pick out a personal favorite moment it is the demonstration of the apparatus as describe in Turing’s paper ‘on computable numbers, with an application to the entscheidungsproblem’, which shows what an amazing thinker Turing was and really ahead of his time.
Decrypting the Codes – William Woollard
This is an enjoyable series covering all aspects of wartime cryptography, ranging from Enigma, The Purple Cipher and how the U boats in the Atlantic where defeated. I found the length of the episodes great to watch during lunch breaks during the week, at 24-25 min long, there is a good mix of evocative historical footage and interviews with key personnel of the topic being covered. I only found one episode had a little too much stock archive footage vs Cryptanalysis material, but that doesn’t really distract from the overall information provided by this six episode series.
My personal favorite was Episode 3 – Breaking Purple, and how it went into William Friedmans work on cryptanalysis and successful decryption the Japanese ‘purple’ cipher. This leads nicely to the next video, which is thankfully on YouTube !
Decrypting the codes – available on Amazon Prime
Portrait of William F. Friedman
At 21 minutes long, this video packs alot of information and great interviews into a short time. I searched out Friedman based on his contribution to Cryptanalysis and breaking the Purple code. There is a introduction on how Friedman arrived in America and how he found his way into Cryptanalysis from a entirely different area of study on genetics.
The background on how he met his wife-to-be Elizabeth was nice touch, as they formed a relationship over their areas of interests, and had a nice romantic relationship. As the video progresses it goes into the work he done on code breaking during WWI and WWII, and how breaking ‘purple’ had an effect on his mental health.
My favorite part of this video is when the machine, built without seeing the purple cipher machine, is shown and the machine developed by Friedman’s team used to break it in how close to identical the appearance them is.
I for one will hoping one day to got Friedman’s library as shown in this gem of a video.
Flaw in the Enigma Code – Numberphile
There are many mathematical and theoretical papers on how Enigma was finally broken, I’m sure many of you are already area of ‘Numberphile’ but this video to me does give the clearest explanation of how Enigma was broken by the Turing and the team at Bletchley Park. There is a whole series of these videos on Enigma, but this one shows the flaw and explains how it was exploited.
The visual representations of ‘blackbox’ of clear text in, cyphertext out, is a good one in my honest opinion. There is also a good way of how the exploit could be corrected, and then went on to developed into an actual encryption method.
So I hope this week I have provided some interesting things to watch and be entrained about cryptanalysis, next week I will return to explaining how I’m getting on with the quantum computer simulator, hybridq