Enigma - 5% for SL-Charity

Enigma is a Cipher device. You may have heard about encryption. The ciphertext is also an encrypting method. When a message is encrypted, the letters get scrambled. To decrypt it, which means understanding the message the receiver should also know how to rearrange the scrambled set of words. To do this the Enigma machine was invented. If someone else found the code, he can not understand the message. So this was helpful for secret missions.

This is how it works. It is like a typewriter. But it has a lamp board with one light for each letter. When a key is pressed a light illuminates, but it is not the corresponding light for the key that has pressed. It was changed by the electrical connection. That's the most important part here.

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3 rotors change the electric signal 7 times. Then the signal flows through a plug board which changes the signal another 2 times. You may think, okay then we can understand the pattern and decode messages easily. But the thing is, rotors rotate each time we press a key. They had used a rachet to perform that mechanism. Therefore the electric flowing path changes always. Therefore you cannot expect the same output for the same key twice. Even though you have an Enigma machine you can not still decipher the codes. You should know the initial setup of the machines before using it. Nazis used different setups for different days of a month.

There's a superb movie named The Imitation Game which shows how a British mathematician builds a machine to crack the Enigma code. That was a great achievement because the Allies faced lots of troubles because they can not understand the messages of Axis powers.