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Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

> She decoded messages which were encrypted by German Enigma machines using Bombe machines invented by Alan Turing at Bletchley Park.

I like Turing, I've read his papers.

I like William Thomas Tutte and had the opportunity to talk to him in Canada many years past.

The Bombe machines were scaled up parallel rack mount versions of the Cyclometer created by Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki, and Henryk Zygalski who cracked the Enigma code and designed the machines that automated the process.

Turing, Flowers, and others built on their work to bring it to industrial scale, which was a feat worthy of note, but the cracking and original invention happened in Poland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclometer

https://blogs.bl.uk/european/2018/01/polish-mathematicians-a...

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Polish Cipher Bureau had been also using leading mathematicians for breaking Soviet ciphers before WW2…

During Polish-Soviet War 1920 Polish HQ had such a complete knowledge of Soviet movements that they had to stage a deception. Polish cavalary division had been sent behind enemy lines to attack Soviet divisional HQ taking all code books and machines to give Soviets credible explanation for Polish ability to read Soviet ciphers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cipher_Bureau_(Poland)

And let us also not forget about Zygalski sheets[0] and Rejewski's Bomba[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zygalski_sheets

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_(cryptography)

Indeed - the Enigma decoding machines at Bletchley were the evolution of earlier designs, two iterations at least that came from the Poles.

I mentioned Tutte as Bletchley can take full credit for the inhouse reverse engineering and attacks on Tunny, the Lorenz cipher, a more difficult cipher than Enigma and one used for more sensitive traffic by the Germans.

Tunny had an entirely seperate dedicated class of machines used for its attacks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_cipher

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer

    Colossus is thus regarded as the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer, although it was programmed by switches and plugs and not by a stored program.

So why label Flowers as one of those that built their work on what the Polish did? Collosus was built (as you say) to solve Tunny.

To be fair they mention the polish contribution at Bletchley Park.

But does the Hollywood movie about Touring mention it? No, it doesn't, and you know why? Because none of the Polish mathematicians who did the actual work were gay.

Well yeah there’s a point to be made isnt there?

Anti polish racism isn’t really a thing in America nowadays - homophobia on the other hand, embarrassingly alive and kicking.

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