Enigma vs modern laptop

[Julian]

Does anyone happen to know if this has ever been tested.

What/who/why you ask? Just a pondering I was doing in the car..

How long would it take a modern laptop, say 2GHz processor to crack the enigma. Turin's early computer was rather basic and could manage it in a few hours at times. So lets not make it easy, lets say shark with four rotors and no daily settings crib, pretty much as Bletchley found themselves after they lost the shark cribs.

If I get off my arse and go and visit Bletchely Park, will I be able to find the answers to questions like this?

J

(decided to become the bumpirate of bluemoment, this is the first of 32 new threads for today)

[DaveS]

Not sure how it compares with 'puters, but the Bowmore Enigma 12 yo is my current favourite airport buy at £43.98 for 2 litres...

[aquaplane]

I saw something on telly years ago, well maybe 5 yreas ago, and it was saying how good the Bletchley Park machine was to crack the code in <24 hrs. Ok they had a good guess at some of the settings but it was cogs and valves.

The top spec PC of the time would have taken a couple of weeks IIRC, certainly too long. Although the modern PC could do many more computations per second, it's a jack of all trades so isn't as eficient as the old jobbie.

The Bletchley machine could only do one job, but it did it rather well considering.

[Telo]

There is a rather nice little piece in this weekend's FT about Post Office engineer Tommy Flowers, who created the Collossus computer in January 1944 that was used, post-Enigma, at Bletchley Park to crack enemy codes.

Link = http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/8a94a76c-b3ac ... ab49a.html.