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From: Eirikur Hallgrimsson <eh@mad.scientist.com>
Organization: Electric Brain
To: Rohit Khare <khare@alumni.caltech.edu>, fork@example.com
Subject: Re: Optical analog computing?
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Uh, WWII Enigma was cracked at Bletchly Park, based on the work of some 
Poles, who had been trying to figure out when they would be invaded.   
Entirely mechanical!   Definitely not optical at all.    Enigma was 
originally broken based on bad use practice.  If it had been employed more 
sensibly it would have been a lot harder.

See "The Code Book" by Singh, Doubleday, 1999.     Or, for that matter, 
"Cryptonomicon" by Stephenson, which is a fictionalization of the Enigma 
cracking story, and pretty accurate.

I eventually get born as a side-effect of the Battle of Britain, you 
see....

Computing with interference patterns, etc, makes perfect sense, but Enigma 
was cracked by building mechanical systems that were essentially Enigma 
machines and brute-forcing.

Eirikur




