Ispectrum Magazine Ispectrum Magazine #03 | Page 34

Some online simulators of Turing’s machine can be found at: http://morphett.info/turing/turing. html http://db.ing.puc.cl/turingmachine/ http://math.hws.edu/TMCM/java/ xTuringMachine/ ways. In addition to the permutations of these rotors, the electrical connections on the back of the machine could be changed manually giving rise to more than 150 million million million possible configurations. To increase the security even more, the orientation of the three rotors changed continuously, so much so that each and every entry could contain a different coding spectrum, even though the characters entered on the keyboard were the same. For example: Typing ‘DODO’ might generate the message ‘FGTB’: The ‘D’ and ‘O’ are Enigma machine The Breaking of the ENIGMA Code The Enigma machine consisted of a keyboard connected to a unit of encoding. The encoding unit contained three separate rotors whose positions determined how they would be coded by each letter on the keyboard. What made the Enigma Code so difficult to break was the enormous number of ways in which the machine could be configured. First, the three rotors of the machine could be chosen from a group of five, and could be changed and exchanged to deceive potential code breakers. Second, each rotor could be located in one of twenty different ways. This means that the machine could be configured in more than a million 33