
How 2,000 Servers Broke the Enigma Code in 13 Minutes - rmason
https://blog.digitalocean.com/how-2000-droplets-broke-the-enigma-code-in-13-minutes/
======
hk__2
> Modern AI Breaks German Enigma Code in 13 Minutes

Please use the original title: "How 2,000 Droplets Broke the Enigma Code in 13
Minutes".

"Modern AI" has very little to do with the performance here. As the article
states, the team worked 4 weeks and had 2,000 machines to run their code. Even
brute-forcing would give you a performance close to that.

Quoting from the article:

> So for the AI to shine, we actually use 2,000 minions that do the tedious
> work. Everybody praises AI, but it's actually the minions that do the 99% of
> work. Life, right?

~~~
dang
Ok, we'll use that title except with an English word replacing the brand name.

------
stereo
It sounds like they just trained a bayesian filter like langdetect to
recognise simple German. A smarter training corpus would have been decrypted
Enigma messages!

A decrypted enigma message looks like this:

BOOTKLARXBEIJSCHNOORBETWAZWOSIBENXNOVXSECHSNULCBMXPROVIANTBISZWONULXDEZXBENOETIGEGLMESERYNOCHVIEFKLHRXSTEHEMARQUBRUNOBRUNFZWOFUHFXLAGWWIEJKCHAEFERJXNNTWWWFUNFYEINSFUNFMBSTEIGENDYGUTESIWXDVVVJRASCH

Plaintext with word divisions, and with garbled letters corrected:

BOOT KLAR X BEI J SCHNOOR J ETWA ZWO SIBEN X NOV X SECHS NUL CBM X PROVIANT
BIS ZWO NUL X DEZ X BENOETIGE GLAESER Y NOCH VIER KLAR X STEHE MARQU BRUNO
BRUNO ZWO FUNF X LAGE WIE J SCHAEFER J X NNN WWW FUNF Y EINS FUNF MB STEIGEND
Y GUTE SICHT VVV J RASCH

Formatted German plaintext:

Boot klar. Bei “Schnoor” etwa 27. Nov. 60 cbm. Proviant bis 20 Dez. Benötige
Gläser, noch 4 klar. Stehe Marqu. BB 25. Lage wie “Schaefer”. NW 5, 15 mb
steigend, gute Sicht. Von “Rasch”.

English translation (words in square brackets added to make the meaning more
clear):

Boat clear. [Will rendezvous] at Schnoor about 27 November. 60 cubic meters
[fuel oil remaining], provisions [sufficient] until 20 December. Need
binoculars; [only] four now serviceable. Am at naval square BB 25. Situation
like Schaefer’s. [Wind] northwest [force] 5, [atmospheric pressure] 15
millibars rising, good visibility. From Rasch.

------
femto113
This 13 minutes on 1000 computers number is really failing to impress me.
Consider that someone on Quora calculated

> the sum total of all the computing power produced by all of the Bombes
> during the entire war is about the same computing power used by one iPhone
> to play back 10 seconds of YouTube

[https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-computing-capacity-of-
Ala...](https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-computing-capacity-of-Alan-Turings-
machine-called-Bombe-that-deciphered-the-Enigma)

------
cornholio
> Within half a day, DigitalOcean had hydrated the 1,000 droplets used in the
> testing phase.

What, the proprietary cloud technologies are now re-writing the English
vocabulary for just an itsy bit of extra vendor lock-in?

I find this double plus hydrating.

------
alexandercrohde
Major misnomer. It sounds like a bunch of cloud servers were used to brute-
force enigma, and then possible "solutions" were checked as valid german by an
AI. The AI didn't break the code.

Also it probably would be trivial to write a non-ai that detects valid german
(e.g. is every word german?). False positives would be easy to filter out.

------
mlthoughts2018
This refers to a PR event that DigitalOcean participated in back in early
December 2017, <
[https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171201005267/en/Dig...](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171201005267/en/DigitalOcean%C2%A0-cracked-
Enigma-Code-record-time%21) >.

By the sound of this article, it makes me suspect DigitalOcean doesn’t really
do any machine learning (here they paid for a marketing piece 7 months
later?).

Not that they need to: they are a great cloud provider. I wonder why they need
to do this for marketing. If the goal is to say, look how we used 1-click for
this PR fluff, will that really be attractive to the sort of enterprise ML
customers who would possibly care? And why 7 months later?

------
rixrax
There are still some (correction: at least one) unbroken Enigma message(s)
from WWII around[1][2]. Would be intriguing see how this would fare on them.

[1]
[https://enigma.hoerenberg.com/index.php?cat=Unbroken](https://enigma.hoerenberg.com/index.php?cat=Unbroken)
[2]
[http://www.bytereef.org/m4_project.html](http://www.bytereef.org/m4_project.html)

------
inetsee
The one line from the article that resonated the most with me was this one:

"What would Alan Turing be able to do nowadays if he had the current computing
power and all the development around AI?"

~~~
wry_discontent
Where would we be if computer programming wasn't recreating nearly identical
CRUD apps and desperately figuring out how to make people on the internet
click on more ads?

~~~
bartread
What really blows my mind is how overcomplicated so many organisations manage
to make these CRUD apps by bolting together as many technologies as humanly
possible. I'm sure it's probably boredom that drives people to it, but for me
the frustration that results from having to work on these bloated and
overcomplicated systems is worse, and I think strongly damaging to businesses.

My own impression, which has only grown stronger with the passage of years, is
that if you did the totally necessary CRUD stuff as simply as possible, that
would open up opportunities to tech-enable businesses in much more interesting
and profitable ways. But, of course, that would involve delaying
gratification, and often doesn't play to the prevailing politics.

Interesting software jobs do exist but, boy, do you have to hunt for them.

