Talk:Bombe

message: Source for the believed existence of another US bombe was Jack Ingram, Curator of the National Cryptologic Museum, during a tour of the museum on Thursday. He told of searching for it and not finding it whole, but noted that they can be broken down into many smaller pieces and thought that it may be buried in storage somewhere which just hasn't yet been discovered. I forget who he mentioned as his source for there being two of them. Jamesday 20:10, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  A second US Bombe

message: I removed the following:
 
A cryptological bombe is essentially a large number of cypher machines in parallel, each decyphering a given message using different keys.  By using dozens or hundreds of machines at once, prospective keys can be attempted in bulk, and the product from each of the decipherments can be screened for plaintext phrases which would indicate that the correct key was used.  The British were concerned with the radio traffic of the German Navy, who used relatively strict procedures for encryption; the technique of loooking for a repeated three-letter wheel setting would not work (as it did for the Army Enigma), and naval Enigmas changed their daily settings based on predetermined schedules, transmitted by courier to ships while in port.
This is where the known plaintext attack became useful.  No human could screen the tens of thousands of keys attempted by the bombes on a daily basis, but the machines could be configured to automatically detect common paintext phrases, most often "EINS" (German for one), or "HEILHITLER".  Upon decrypting such a phrase, the machines were configured to halt and make the operator aware of the potential hit.
I'm afraid this has a number of problems. 1) A single bombe examined the keys in series, not in parallel. Although there might be a dozen Enigma-equivalents used at each point, each rotor setting was examined in sequence. 2) The bombes were used for most Enigma traffic, not just that of the Navy, since the double encipherment indicator procedure came to an end in May 1940. 3) The bombes did not recognize plaintext. The bombe performed logical deductions on a known plaintext and flagged those which did not lead to a logical contradiction. — Matt 09:17, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Principle of the bombe

message: We should talk about the revisions to bombe. I was trying to give an explaination without the hand waving so people could get the gist of the idea. Admittedly, it was oversimplified. I also don't understand why you excised my description of the Stecker board. The sentence you left has no context. Perhaps we could negotiate a joint text. My e-mail is areinhold "at" alum.mit.edu. --agr 16:22, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Sure; the problem was that your description wasn't just oversimplified, but (I'm afraid to say) it was actually incorrect. But I do think hand-waving gists are good, and I think it's a good idea to start off with such a summary before lurching into a description of the nitty-gritty detail of how it worked. I'm very happy (in fact, prefer!) to work collaboratively (after all, this is Wikipedia ;-) ). — Matt
I thought the model i described was a good introduction to the concept. Maybe it would help if you could say what you thought was incorrect about it. --agr 19:08, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

text: Sure; your description said If one had a guess, say that the letter G as input should produce a letter K as output, one could connect a voltage to the G input of the spinning set of rotors and use the K output to stop the motor. The stack would then spin until there was a match. — if there was no plugboard, such a machine would have worked, but this is not what the bombe did; the plugboard stops you from knowing the input and output to the rotors. So Turing had to come up with something a little more subtle. — Matt 19:27, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

text: Sure, I'm going to be away for the weekend, so please do go ahead and work on the page as you think is necessary, and I'll have a look on Monday and make some more changes and additions myself. — Matt 16:04, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bombe revisions 

message: It would be nice to know whether or not the Bombe is considered by experts to fit into the definition of a computer? If so, we should replace the ":Category:Computer hardware" with "Early computers". If not, we should arguably rm the article from the former category. --Wernher 14:35, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't know of any expert comment either way — it does fit into the first description given at computer: A computer is a device for making calculations or controlling operations that are expressible in numerical or logical terms. The bombe makes a calculation that is expressible in logical terms. However, I wouldn't call the bombe a computer, for whatever that's worth. It's certainly common in books about WWII cryptography to label Colossus as an early / the first computer, but not to describe the bombe in that way (even though the bombe was built earlier). — Matt 20:33, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Computer or not?

message: Ground 01:22, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It's not clear where the lamps are connected, nor is it clear why the lamps stay dark. Moreover, the Bombe didn't use lamps. — Matt Crypto 10:30, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: What a polished article!

message: The Engima box, center column (more or less) early on in the article, is out of place an doverlaps some text. Or, the text line overlaps the box. Either way, someone who understnads the WP mechanisms might take a look and move it a bit down with respect to the text. ww 05:32, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: oddity of display formatting

message: It says in the text that "we can also observe that T encrypts to W at position 2". It appears to me that T encrypts to S. However, I didn't want to change it in case I had misunderstood. Can someone comment here please?
:It's now fixed I see.DI Ramekin 16:01, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Is there a mistake in "reasoning about steckered values?"

message: Why is there this irrelevant link?
: It was pointing to the wrong Heath Robinson ;-) — Matt Crypto 06:45, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Heath Robinson 

message: Is it pronounced the same as "bomb", or is it two syllables, or what?  If anyone knows, please add this information to the article. 81.86.133.45 12:53, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Nearly six years to the day you have an answer! It's two syllables. Using Google language tools the Polish is pronounced quite clearly as "bomba" with a short a. See my post below for further discussion on the word. Nodekeeper (talk) 08:47, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Unfortunately this does not appear to be correct. The youtube videos of Tony Jarvis, a bombe reconstruction engineer, and even better, Jean Valentine, one of the original bombe operators, have them both clearly pronouncing it the same as English "bomb". So, one syllable. Runox (talk) 11:59, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: One syllable for sure. Visit Bletchley Park and speak with the people who rebuilt a working one, they all say it (as the English word) "bomb".   — Aldaron • T/C   15:04, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pronunciation? 

message: Are there no original photographs of the British Bombe, only of the cardboard mockup? TedColes (talk) 16:22, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: While this is an old question, the answer is yes there are and I note that the article does not include them. 
http://d.ibtimes.co.uk/en/full/1409229/rows-bombe-machines-work-bletchley-park.jpg
There is another similar image. But both are Crown Copyright. 95.144.179.149 (talk) 00:20, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Photo of British Bombe

message: Does anyone have a source for the statement that the British (as opposed to the American) bombe rang a bell when it found a stop?--TedColes (talk) 12:00, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Bombe and bell?

message: I don't think that using mathematical notation is particularly helpful to the average reader in explaining how the bombe works. What do others think? --TedColes (talk) 05:41, 21 April 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Scrap mathematical notation? 

message: This project broke 17 !! Enigma M4 messages from Uboat U534 the last two weeks.
They used a software Turingbombe. More messages will follow.
They used 112 CPU cores.
Project website: http://www.enigma.hoerenberg.com
217.81.48.230 (talk) 11:20, 14 August 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  The first German WW2 Naval ENIGMA M4 TURINGBOMBE break since 1945 

message: Is the US Army Bombe still in existence or was it scrapped? --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 15:59, 22 November 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  US Army Bombe 

message: My understanding is that the Poles started this and then when they fled to England Turing et. al. developed it further to cope with the ever more complex enigma.  The article makes it seem like the English system was developed independently from the Polish one.  Needs to be clarified one way or the other. 118.208.69.118 (talk) 03:02, 4 February 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: It is correct to say that the Poles started the decryption of Enigma, and that without their achievements, the British would not have achieved anything like as much as they did. I don't, however, read the article as implying that the Polish contribution was unimportant. What is clear is that the Turing-Welchman Bombe was not a straight development of the Polish Bomba, as it worked on a different principle.--TedColes (talk) 10:10, 4 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Polish Contribution 

message: The dates and duration is inconsistent with what is written on the page about John Harper. These should be in unison.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.211.22.214 (talk) 07:56, 21 May 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rebuild/replica of Bombe led by John Harper 

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replies: text: Both links work and seem useful. Dhtwiki (talk) 22:39, 5 November 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: "using it and earlier machines" perhaps "using it with earlier machines" ??85.149.83.125 (talk) 22:38, 2 December 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  grammar

message: "At each position of the rotors, an electric current would or would not flow in each of the 26 wires, and this would be tested in the bombe's comparator unit. For a large number of positions, the test would lead to a logical contradiction, ruling out that setting. If the test did not lead to a contradiction, the machine would stop."
How was a logical contradiction indicated? By not stopping? S C Cheese (talk) 18:16, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Exactly that. Logical contradiction was the normal state, meaning "this is not a solution". — The Anome (talk) 07:09, 13 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bombe stop 

message: As I understand it, even the British bombe could not stop instantaneously, and it had to be rewound a bit by hand to find the exact point at which the solution was found. (The American bombe, on the other hand, ran at such a speed that it would massively overshoot the solution, so had an auto-rewind mechanism.) However, I don't have a source for the British bombe being rewound; I only remember this from a talk given at the Bletchley Park museum a few years ago. Does anyone have a source for the manual rewinding? — The Anome (talk) 07:13, 13 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rewinding