Interesting story.

[random_walker]

I only ever knew about the Enigma and Colossus stuff. This is another technological battle from WWII - the writing is rather poor even for wikipedia, which is mostly sourced from Most Secret War: British Scientific Intelligence 1939-1945 (OoP everywhere; $44 here as a textbook, £8 as a "brilliant bestseller" over there) which I have of course not

Comments

[hfwolfe]

Funny you mention this now:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/24/bletchley_park_appeal/

[hfwolfe]

>>But in the end, who cares and what does it matter if you are scientific about things, if you only ever do them once?<<

You mean like Nancy Reagan consulting astrologers as Ronnie succumbed to dementia during nuclear tensions? It matters a fuck lot, I tell you.

You can make philisophical arguments for strategy where the number of available plays times the bet is less than the variance, but that really doesnt apply in this context. Leaving a casino broke isn't the same risk as a civilization being destroyed.

[random_walker]

By "unscientific" I did not mean "totally batshit". Beyond that, this following might annoy you.

I meant something more like "cunning", "unrepeatable" and "suboptimal". In the absence of perfect OR solutions, intuition can beat out attempted perfect reasoning simply because it has access to more data and can perform faster. It can also go horrible awry, yes. Then again, science is pretty popular at the moment because we have the luxuries of resource and time. This moment will pass.

Although I may comment: it's plausible to me that those stories were exaggerated to "psych out" our enemies at the time. This strategy for nuclear brinkmanship is damned dangerous and also quite scientific, so it seems that scientific thinking doesn't necessarily have much to do with avoiding the end of our world. Likewise from a scientific standpoint Enron was a useful experiment albeit with terrible controls. I still find it unnecessary.

[hfwolfe]

<>

It seems quite the opposite. After the war, the US/UK actively prevented public disclosure of ULTRA until the 70s. This is possibly because they sold enigma machines to 3rd-world governments without telling them they could decrypt them. Whether they covertly released it to the Soviets beforehand is also unlikely, because this would have been excellent "impirialist threat" rhetoric for the USSR to share with non-aligned nations.

One thing I loved reading was that The Allies had to send conspicuous recon planes on fake missions to "spot" shipments and fleets that they would bomb, so that the Axis wouldn't know about ULTRA.. The military at least seemed to believe that decryption was more beneficial than intimidation.

[random_walker]

Regarding "psych out": I was referring to promoting abroad the idea that we had an astrologer connected to the Button.

I like the idea about (re-)selling Enigmas. I think this is referenced in a Gibson novel (Count Zero?) where a has-been legendary hacker realizes that the developing Africa is inheriting the obsolete computers and software he became legendary for attacking. Although he is never caught, in sober retrospect he realizes that he is personally responsible for millions of starvation deaths and spends the rest of his life wallowing morosely in this data.