and Justin replied:
> It was a scrambler.
I'm sorry I was slow in replying, maybe some confusion could have been avoided. I also don't know how much detail is tolerable on a list like this.
But no, Justin, the Enigma is a complex polyalphabetic substitution cipher. This is easy to demonstrate if anybody insists.
I'm not sure, but I suspect that Carrol means "transposition cipher" when he says "scrambler." The Enigma does not transpose letters.
AFAIK, the Enigma did not use the German alphabet. It used the standard 26 letter alphabet, which was the standard in international telegraphy, and international telegraphy did not support umlauts or the Cyrillic alphabets, or anything but 26 latin letters. German was spelled out: The most frequent message was LAGEUNVERAENDERT, umlauts spelled out ("situation unchanged").
Some corrections on its breaking. It was the Poles who first broke the Enigma before the War began. Marion Rajewski is the only name I recall today, but there were three of them. They escaped to the British bringing their work with them. In the meantime the Germans complicated the Enigma beyond the resources that Poland could muster. I'm not sure, but I seem to remember that with the strengthened Enigma, the captured machine was important in providing the order of letters on the rotors. There was no reason to assume that the order was the standard alphabet, but so it was, which greatly aided solution.
Justin must mean Andrew Hodges biography of Turing, _Alan Turing: The Enigma_. This is a marvelous book which I highly recommend. Turing was a very lonely homosexual, in math and the hard sciences, as well as in super secret work, not the arts or literature where he might have found more support. Hodges handles that with sensitivity, or at least so I think. The biography isn't anything about economics or lefty bashing, but despite that list readers might give it a try.
Andrew Hodges maintains a web site devoted to Turing at http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/ I recommend browsing it.
There are pictures of Enigmas at the NSA web site http://www.nsa.gov/ at their web Cryptologic Museum, and I believe that Bletchley Park also has some pictures at http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/. It also has an explanation of how the contraption worked.
But enough. On to Marx and politics.
-- John K. Taber
--- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.394 / Virus Database: 224 - Release Date: 10/3/02