Today’s AI can crack second world war Enigma code ‘in short order’, experts say

The Enigma code was a fiendish cipher that took Alan Turing and his fellow codebreakers a herculean effort to crack. Yet experts say it would have crumbled in the face of modern computing.

While Polish experts broke early versions of the Enigma code in the 1930s and built anti-Enigma machines, subsequent security upgrades by the Germans meant Turing had to develop new machines, or “Bombes”, to help his team of codebreakers decipher enemy messages. By 1943, the machines could decipher two…