Turing Could Have Cracked Enigma in No Time at All With the Help of Latest AI, Say Scientists

The Enigma code was a fiendish cipher that took Alan Turing and his fellow codebreakers a Herculean effort to crack.

- Nicola Davis

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 decipher enemy messages.

By 1943 the machines could read two messages a minute.

Yet while the race to break the Enigma code has become legendary, credited with shortening the second world war by up to two years, and spawning various Hollywood films, experts say cracking it would be a trivial matter today.

"Enigma wouldn't stand up to modern computing and statistics," said Michael Wooldridge, a professor of computer science and an expert in artificial intelligence at the University of Oxford.

The Enigma device was an electromechanical machine that resembled a typewriter. It had three rotors that each had 26 possible positions, a reflector that sent the signal back through the rotors and a plugboard that swapped pairs of letters.