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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Science
Nicola Davis Science correspondent

Today’s AI can crack second world war Enigma code ‘in short order’, experts say

The Enigma machine, looking like a typewriter, in a wooden case
The four-rotor German Enigma cypher machine was used to encode wartime messages by Axis powers. Photograph: Science & Society Picture Library/SSPL/Getty Images

The Enigma code was a fiendish cipher that took Alan Turing and his fellow codebreakers a herculean effort to crack. Yet experts say it would have crumbled in the face of modern computing.

While Polish experts broke early versions of the Enigma code in the 1930s and built anti-Enigma machines, subsequent security upgrades by the Germans meant Turing had to develop new machines, or “Bombes”, to help his team of codebreakers decipher enemy messages. By 1943, the machines could decipher two messages every minute.

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