A few weeks ago I went to the Imperial War Museum in London to watch an artificial intelligence program attempt to crack the mindbendingly complex Enigma code used by the Germans during the second world war. It did so in 12 minutes and 50 seconds.
Having already machine read some German language training data from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the AI program crunched through billions of permutations generated by the four-rotor Enigma machine sifting combinations of letters for their “Germanness”.
A challenge that had occupied some of Britain’s most brilliant mathematical minds at Bletchley Park for many months and at enormous cost was solved by a modern AI program in a few minutes for only ￡10. The program, developed by the data analytics company Enigma Pattern and boosted by 2,000 virtual servers, was able to check an astonishing 41m combinations a second.