Bletchley Park

A trip to Bletchley Park was a lot of fun. Once again I got to see the facilities and learn about the history of the great code breaking endeavor that happened here during WWII.



The front entrance of the main building (the former manor house) is quite impressive.

Inside we saw lots of interesting rooms filled with information about how they workers here spent their free time and some of the notable mathematicians that worked here. This room is graced by a bust of Churchill on the mantle.

But over in the cinder block buildings where the real work happened, we find gloomy small rooms, sparsely furnished, for lots of hard mental work.

There rooms were provided with maps of the relevant areas of the war and German dictionaries. There were also maps and dictionaries for japanese in another section since towards the end of the war, the Americans joined in and there were code from the Pacific broken here as well.

At the heart of the matter is the Enigma Machine.

And Turing's Bombe.

The really fascinating machine is Colossus. This was developed to break the Lorenz SZ40 code and was much more complicated than the Enigma breaking Bombe. The Lorenz machine used 5 wheels to make the initial encoding and this was followed by 5 more wheels that were changed at shifting intervals that were determined by another 2 wheels. Determining the settings of the wheels was dones in stages one or two at a time. A probabilistic approach was used to zero in on the answer. The message or a portion of it, was put on paper tape (bits to the character) and each time it was read into the machine it would electronically try another possibility and accumulate the likely results. This was the first electronic computer.

Colossus and the Bombe are now housed in the the National Computer Museum next to the Bletchley Park Museum.