Crowning achievement of Alan Turing’s codebreakers is now ‘straightforward’, according to computer scientists
Today’s many things are significantly better than things back then. Progress.
Today’s AI can crack second world war Enigma code ‘in short order’, experts say
Submitted 3 weeks ago by BrikoX@lemmy.zip to technology@lemmy.zip
Comments
Lembot_0002@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
What do you expect? Computers have gotten a lot faster over the last 80 or so years.
irishPotato@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Surprise surprise, very well-known, solved, problem with endless coverage online is solvable by models trained on the internet…
NuraShiny@hexbear.net 3 weeks ago
What fucking experts! Wow! A thing that was cracked DURING WW2 can also be cracked in 2025? Waow! So impressive! So useful! Amazing!
Fuck off with this tripe. If the solution of how Enigma worked is available on the internet, an AI can eventually bumble it’s way into stealing it, without understanding what it’s doing, by copying those solutions. Potentially. They haven’t done it yet. But in their mind palaces, it would be easy if they power up enough servers to run a full-scale MMO.
I really think one of the biggest reason manager types love AI so much is that it’s easier to throw computation resources at problems, than it is to hire people, because that takes time.
drspod@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
No, LLMs can’t decipher Enigma ciphertext.
“It would be straightforward to recreate the logic of bombes in a conventional program,” Wooldridge said, noting the AI model ChatGPT was able to do so. “Then with the speed of modern computers, the laborious work of the bombes would be done in very short order.”
He’s speculating that an LLM could write a program to do so.
Using a slightly different approach – that Wooldridge suggested might be slower – researchers have previously used an AI system trained to recognise German using Grimm’s fairytales, together with 2,000 virtual servers, to crack a coded message in 13 minutes.
The link is to an abstract that tells you nothing more without an account on this website. But a better write-up of the mentioned research is here: digitalocean.com/…/how-2000-droplets-broke-the-en…
In late 2017, at the Imperial War Museum in London, developers applied modern artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to break the “unbreakable” Enigma machine …
So this is about research from 8 years ago! They go on to explain that they did a brute-force attack on the key, using a RNN (recurrent neural network) classifier to detect if the decrypted text looked like German.
I’m no cryptographer but I’m pretty sure that we have been able to classify language samples quite successfully for a long time using much simpler (and faster) statistical techniques, like n-gram frequency analysis.
The fact that the Guardian article mentions none of this and presents the topic ambiguously enough to make it sound like ChatGPT can break ciphers on its own makes me think this is more deliberate AI-hype.
Tenkard@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
This is super stupid.
Yeah because AI was trained on the works of Alan Turing and the others. This is like saying that I’m smarter than Turing because I can open a browser and look up how the enigma machine worked while it took months for them.
The rest of the job (the actual decrypting) was made by brute forcing solutions so it has nothing to do with AI. Again, I’m not smarter than old mathematicians because I can fire up wolfram alpha and solve integrals in seconds.
Slop