I just had a rather remarkable experience Today. I visited Bletchley Park, the center for British cryptanalysis during World War 2, located about 40 miles north of London. It was a relatively last minute visit (part of a last minute trip come to think of it) and I hadn't even thought of it before I left the US. But when I got to Amsterdam I though of it, and looked it up. It was actually quite hard to find any information about it, it wasn't even mentioned in the Lonely Planet guide to Great Britain. I eventually found it online and decided to go on when I got back to London. I was only going to have 1 or 2 days in London, but as soon as I thought of it, I knew I wanted to go. I found out their hours, found a train I could take and was all set. Then, I started to wander around their site and was very suprised to noticed that the day I had planned to go, really the only day I could, was a special reunion event where vetrans who had actually worked there during WW2 were meeting! There were presentaions, movies and music all planned. Seriously, I was just hoping they were going to be open that day.
So I show up this morning and it was pretty cool. I went to 3 lectures, 2 were very good. One was on the actually mechanics and history of the enigma machine (with some nice math on the difficulty of breaking it), and another was a similar discussion of the ideas behind the code breaking machines called bombes. The second talk was perhaps more thoeretical, going more into depth about Alan Turing's work with information theory and computer design. The other talk I saw that day about the recent (2000-2002) theft of an enigma machine, was a little less interesting. I have already forgoten her name, but it was given by the current director of Bletchley park, and she spent way too much time trying to draw paralelles between the thrilling work done in the 40's compared to her involvement in trying to track down the stolen enigma machine. Plus, she was plugging this book about it she wrote, which sounded equally overly dramatic.
Two highlights of the day though.
They organized a photo shoot of all the vetrans who had shown up, and I wandered over there to take my own picture of them. While I was taking a picture I started talking with a man about ... I don't even remember, I think huricane Katrina of all things... and we talked a bit more and I noticed he was wearing a "Vetran" sticker (my sticker said "Weekend Visitor") so I asked him if he was a vetran from Bletchley. He said no, that he was instead in the RAF, and he guestured to the group being pictured, and said that his wife worked here during the war. We kept talking and his wife came over and the three of us talked for about 10 minutes. I'm not sure we talked much about Bletchley itself, but it was still thrilling to talk to two british WW2 vetrans. I wish I had gotten a picture with them, but that would have perhaps been too much.
The second highlight came when I wandered around into one of the other buildings behiend the park and noticed a replica of one of the bombes that was being worked on. The bombe (and another code breaking machine called the Colossus) is credited with being one of the first semi-programmable computers. It was the result of a brilliant idea that Turing, as well as other cryptographer/mathematicians came up with to break the enigma code that involed some basic mathematical properties of the enigma code, as well as amazing leaps in autoamating most of the cryptographic work. Unfortunatley, all of the bombes themselves were destroyed after the war, so no authentic ones acutally exist today. But they are almost done with a working replica. It's been harder to create than one might think becuase of the secrecy involved in creating them, and the loss of most all the documentation. The remarkable thing was that today, the main engineer was there with a group of vetrans who had worked on the original bombes and they were all discussing how the progess was going. I just stood there for probably well over 20 minutes watching these excited 80 or 90 year old women (women outnumberd men at Bletchly 3 to 1) poke and prod this machine, and most interestingly, point out to the engineer all the things they thought he was doing wrong. What was crazy, was outside and even just down the hall, the few other turists who had shown up didn't seem to notice this was even happening, and continued to walk around in a daze listening to their self guided audio tour. They talked about operating the orignal machines and all the difficulties and excitements they had. The engineer even turned it on breifely in responce to one of their questions. I can't believe I was lucky enough to wander into it. I only took a couple of pictures becuase I didn't want to intrude that much, but now I wish I had gotten up the nerve to ask them about it myself and maybe get a picture of them with the bombe.
Anyway, just wanted to talk about that before I forgot any of it. I'll try to put up the pictures I took soon. Probably on Tuesday or Thursday next week when I get back to the Bay Area.
