World's first computer. "They gave it to the CIA." "Oh, superb." Best response ever.

@monkeytron5061

4 жыл бұрын

Don Sylvester That made me laugh loads too

@erinnolen8627

4 жыл бұрын

I agree totally !

@PanglossDr

3 жыл бұрын

Except it wasn't a computer.

@Friek555

3 жыл бұрын

There are lots of things that some claim to be the first computer. That way, lots of countries can claim to have invented it! :D

@MrBulky992

3 жыл бұрын

@@PanglossDr What's your definition of a computer? Colossus was fully electronic (except for the clocking mechanism which used the paper tape sprocket holes) and programmable rather than hardwired for its intended use so therefore capable of carrying out computational tasks other than codebreaking. This multi-purpose capability was demonstrated in the final tests prior to commissioning at the end of 1943, precisely because the construction team wanted to demonstrate that they had built what we would now describe as a 'computer'.

I love David Mitchell's face after being told he was right. It looks like he's both very proud of being right, but also his Britishness dictates that he isn't allowed to show said pride in any way. So he ends up starting to smile only to quickly drop the smile and freeze his face for a couple of seconds.

@watchingaccount

2 жыл бұрын

legit reminds me in school when the smartarses would do the exact same shit. me included ofcofc

@AllenKnutson

Жыл бұрын

I'm going to guess that he researched a bunch for History of Numberwang. kzread.info/dash/bejne/X6ZqsLtte8-efdY.html

@jaysparrow6631

Ай бұрын

He known as the teachers pet in certain circles 😅

Talking to David Mitchell about WWII seems like a cool way to spend a few hours.

@1919georgekelly

6 жыл бұрын

I think it would be horrific spending a few hours in the company of that bore.

@BlueFury2577

5 жыл бұрын

Well then you'd be wrong ^^

@2109917162

5 жыл бұрын

You know as dickish of a comment that is, I think to some extent David would agree with you. He is very pragmatic and he would argue that by definition he is boring. Don't get happy though your still a dick.

@fallartifact8904

5 жыл бұрын

Daryl?

@vagabondwastrel2361

5 жыл бұрын

It depends how much you enjoy sarcasm.

One famous method of cracking Enigma was recording messages on Hitler's birthday. Every operator basically sent ... Happy Birthday ... all on the same day ...

@diabl2master

5 жыл бұрын

4/20 lmao blaze it

@WaterCrane

5 жыл бұрын

The other word they look out for is "wetterbericht", I believe. Basically the daily weather report. What helped is that the Enigma had a flaw in its design in that a letter wouldn't be encrypted into itself, so a plaintext T would never become a ciphertext T. With that knowledge, you can find potential positions when placing "wetterbericht" against the ciphertext. An early version of the "known plaintext attack".

@eddiebarrett844

5 жыл бұрын

@@WaterCrane There is a fantastic video here kzread.info/dash/bejne/iGiKlMSpis_XqJs.html describing the flaw (human error). Well worth a view.

@phililpb

5 жыл бұрын

Gordon Welchman was the man who worked on these quirks looking for patterns and repeated phrases whilst Turing worked mathematical side. It was very much a team effort. The volume of traffic was also monitored to identify areas of importance. Very clever stuff indeed

@martinborgen

4 жыл бұрын

@@WaterCrane Yes, but only with regards to the weather-stations (for other traffic, the word 'wetterbericht' was just one among others). Basically, you would be pretty sure that one or more weather-stations would send the word more, and the requirement for frequent weather-reports made it a good choice. But any other word could be 'searched' for, if you knew what subject a particular sender was reporting on.

The best part of the story is how the Poles got their hands on the Enigma. The german government mailed one with the normal Postal Service to their embassy in Warsaw a few weeks before the war started. The guy in the post office in Warsaw decided - on a hunch - to delay the pick-up of the parcel over the weekend (basically because the guy that wanted to pick it up seemed way too eager to him). He informed military intelligence and they took the machine apart, documented it and put it back together, all in one weekend.

@48sydney

5 жыл бұрын

That's really interesting. I think Polish are quite smart.

@gerdforster883

5 жыл бұрын

@@48sydney At least smarter than German diplomats.

@malahammer

5 жыл бұрын

@@gerdforster883 They needed to be, being constantly attacked from the East and the West!

@tombowen826

4 жыл бұрын

Complete bullshit, but harmless so who cares?

@konradzawadzki2616

4 жыл бұрын

I am Polish and I didn't know about this "postal service" event : ) To be honest there were also some incredibly stupid things the Polish intelligence did before WW2 that allowed Germans to take over Poland more easily than they would. But than again, later during the German occupation numerous Polish Resistance organizations managed to pull off some really amazing military actions that rarely anyone knows about today, because 90% of Western WW2 movies show only the French or Soviet Resistance. The Polish underground for example built from scratch their own tank during the Warsaw Uprising or put a spy (a voluteer agent) to Auschwitz, arranged his escape to the tell world about it or liberated a death camp in Nazi occupied Czech Republic, the only death camp liberated by Resistance units in the history of WW2.

"Oh superb!" perfect!

@1969Kismet

7 жыл бұрын

;)

@lizsheridan5025

6 жыл бұрын

Jani Pestana b

@Lumibear.

3 жыл бұрын

Our top brass has a long history of this, as strangely enough, in a class system when you’re the ruling class who has everything you could ever want, you don’t have much motivation or interest in change. Eg. They didn’t give Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the word wide web, any recognition for his world changing invention until the early stages of social media pressured them to (invented in 1989, knighted in 2004).

"Give them what they want" - Winston Churchill. You know you're onto something when you're told that you have no budget limit for your project.

@thetooginator153

4 жыл бұрын

Matti - Exactly what I was thinking. Churchill was pretty good at understanding priorities. I’m sure Churchill was thinking about the value of British encryption to the war effort, and how bad it would be if the Germans could read every bit of sensitive communication (which was entirely possible). The brutal part of this is that it was vital that the Germans think that their communications were secure, so the secrecy at Bletchley Park was extremely serious. Bletchley Park employed many women, and I read that they were all told that if they discussed their work with ANYONE, they would be executed immediately. I assume the wages were pretty good...

@MrSpruce

4 жыл бұрын

Quoting, "ACTION THIS DAY Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done."

@countiblis1246

3 жыл бұрын

Words are cheap though. One of the engineers and main designer of Colossus (a complete genius and unsung hero) Tommy Flowers had to use his own money that he'd saved up whilst working for the Post Office to build the fucking thing. As Eisenhower said, it probably shortened the war by 2 years and for that the government grudgingly gave back Flowers £1000 of the money he'd put in. Being the gent he was he then split the cash with the rest of his team.

@danieldravot341

3 жыл бұрын

Churchill was presented with unique responsibilities with the breaking of Enigma. It was learned, through the broken code, that the Lutfwaffe was going to carry out a full-on raid of Coventry. Churchill was faced with the choice of scrambling the RAF to defend Coventry, thus showing their hand to the Germans, or to let the Germans through to destroy the city, in order to protect the code. Churchill made the tough decision and he allowed the raid to proceed without extraordinary RAF intercession, thus keeping the secret of Enigma a secret.

@karlhrdylicka

3 жыл бұрын

@@countiblis1246 ,Thank you , took ages reading through comments before someone who knows the truth about ;Tommy Flowers; is even mentioned, Tommy didn't design and build Colossus single handed , but was the man who built a small a underfunded group that had the dedication and knowledge that valves could do the switching and selecting needed to build what is actually the worlds first electronic programmable computer , Thanks Tommy and all of your team .

That's Numberwang

@bbb462cid

6 жыл бұрын

well played

@acxezknightnite1377

5 жыл бұрын

Hugo De Bouvre LOL!!

@Nickelodeon81

4 жыл бұрын

Collosson solved it

@FergusGriggs

4 жыл бұрын

The world is numberwang, therefore I am the world

@TheHutchy01

4 жыл бұрын

That's Nurembergwang

2:10 Maybe I shouldn't be proud of this, but I'm happy the panelists and the audience had the good sense to not make any sort of jokes during this part. Turing was a giant, and I'm glad he received the respect he so rightly deserves.

@darthozlord

3 жыл бұрын

I don’t think Stephen would have forgiven them if they did - as a gay man himself turning Turing into a joke would be insulting

@AgentOccam

2 жыл бұрын

It would have been incredibly insulting. Turing was so poorly treated by the very state, the very society, that he helped immensely. I'm disgusted by his treatment after WW2.

@matthewjeremy6887

2 жыл бұрын

I will personly murder anyone who insults that man infront of me

@2HN.

2 жыл бұрын

@@darthozlord that's gei

Can we all take a moment to remember Stephen Fry. He's not dead or anything, but he made the show.

@TheMultiGamerOfficial

3 жыл бұрын

Yet

@Lumibear.

3 жыл бұрын

@@TheMultiGamerOfficial put the knife down. ;)

@TheMultiGamerOfficial

3 жыл бұрын

@@Lumibear. I don't wanna.

@Lumibear.

3 жыл бұрын

@@TheMultiGamerOfficial 😊

So first a Polish man with Jewish resemblance cracked the code, then a homosexual, quite the dream team against the nazi's.

@ricardlupus

6 жыл бұрын

Yeah, if that doesn't chalk it up for diversity vs. racial purity!

@ThomasDTank-pr8hy

6 жыл бұрын

Nazis*

@goostec33

6 жыл бұрын

He wasn't Jewish I'm afraid!

@wierdalien1

6 жыл бұрын

The Knick jewish _resemblance_

@goostec33

6 жыл бұрын

Neither that!

Colossus was made by Tommy Flowers, a post office engineer who built it, in his spare time, using his own money. It was used to crack the Lorenz cypher, which the Allies called 'Tunny'.

@mrvolcada5355

3 жыл бұрын

An underrated genius

"Many boffins died to bring us this information."

@laurabogar3956

4 жыл бұрын

Brilliant!

@kujobananaro6737

4 жыл бұрын

Diana Cavendish *bothans

@ShizuruNakatsu

4 жыл бұрын

@@kujobananaro6737 Not in this case.

@laurabogar3956

4 жыл бұрын

It was a play on words. That was why it was amusing.

@AlanTaylormusic

4 жыл бұрын

Ha ha. Best response.

I currently live in the building where Marian Rejewski lived.

wait! so it wasnt Benedict Cumberbatch !?!?!?!?

@sandrosliske

7 жыл бұрын

Bendydick Cumerspatch

@Zakkarae

7 жыл бұрын

Ryan Brooks Benefactor CucumberPatch?

@christianpettersson9014

7 жыл бұрын

BenTheRich ConstableMatch

@najeyrifai1134

7 жыл бұрын

Bellatrix HamperSnatch

@celimendez7620

7 жыл бұрын

Beenevicted Plumberwatch

RIP Alan Turing (June 23, 1912 - June 7, 1954), aged 41 You will always be remembered as a legend and a hero.

It's fantastic watching the panel just sit and listen to Stephen like children listening to their grandparents fascinating stories

@sunnyjim1355

5 жыл бұрын

That's because Stephen is the host with all the answers right in his hand. Jeez you are fucking stupid.

@bellamckinnon8655

4 жыл бұрын

Sunny Jim yikes, what stick did you have up your ass when you replied with that?

Henryk Zygalski, Jerzy Różycki and Marian Rejewski first cracked the enigma code, everyone should know that.

I've visited Bletchley Park and The Computer Museum next door. Well worth the visit! But do check the schedules, not all of the Computer Museum's exhibits are open every day.

@delboy4711

7 жыл бұрын

The Museum of Computing is in my opinion much more interesting than Bletchley Park. Book in advance for the guided tour. It costs less than the general admission to Bletchley Park and you will get a much better insight. Bletchley Park downplays the struggle to decode the Lorenz code and the construction of the Colossus computer. They have virtually nothing about it. By contrast at the museum of Computing they have a Colossus complete and working as well as all the other equipment used to collect the signals. It was at the M of C I learned that Alan Turing, genius though he was, in fact had nothing to do with decoding Lorenz and with building Colossus. Stephen Fry was wrong when he said that. It was John Tiltman and Bill Tutte who worked out how Lorenz worked without even having seen a Lorenz machine. And it was Tommy Flowers who designed and built Colossus based on Bill Tuttes deductions. Turing was a great man, and his work on Enigma was immense, but lets not forget those other heroes.

@bace1000

7 жыл бұрын

François Caron I also visited the museum, and I can't recommend it enough!

@loodlebop

7 жыл бұрын

François Caron I used to live near it and go to college next to it. although it's fascinating Bletchley itself will give you aids, that's if you're not stabbed first. the place is rough as shit and other than the museum not a place I would recommend visiting

@cigmorfil4101

7 жыл бұрын

i visited BP years ago when it just starting - in the shop it had one of those "decloaking" mugs (thermo stuff on surface that goes clear when heated) which had an enigma encoded message; the instructions said to visit their Enigma machine which was set up correctly to decode it. Then the bombe was in the first stage of construction with just the case and the enigma dials. When Colossus was rebuilt you could visit it (and the M of C) as part of your entry. I heard about BP guides being told not to visit the Colossus rebuild ans on my last visit there the new entry hall had been built and the N of C was physically cut off from BP into a separate entity. To be blunt I is not happy about what had happened there as Colossus and the breaking of the Lorentz cypher was pretty vital (made all the more remarkable by them creating a machine to do the Lorentz en/deciphering without ever seeing a real one - it was all worked out (by hand) from the intercepted message(s) and then a British machine was modified to the specs).

@cush6827

6 жыл бұрын

But the cafeteria is quite alright...

“Indeed. I’m already moist.” ROTFL I love Brit humor!

@sunnyjim1355

5 жыл бұрын

First off, she DANISH. XD And second, she's a feminist...so that comment wasn't meant as a joke, she meant it as an insult. Wake up.

@phillipridgway8317

5 жыл бұрын

First off, Jo Brand is British, and second it is a style of humour known as sarcasm, so it is meant as a joke and not as an insult. Go back to sleep!!!

@DerryPope

5 жыл бұрын

Sunny Jim Are you getting her confused with Sandi Toksvig? Easy mistake for an idiot to make.

@ilikethisnamebetter

4 жыл бұрын

Yes she is English, not Danish.. but she's about as funny as Sandi Toksvig - that's to say, not at all.

@samreid1769

4 жыл бұрын

Sunny Jim fuck of mate 😂

Bletchley Park is absolutely breathtaking. It's got such a beautifully important air about it, the history of it is magnificent. I feel very privileged to have been twice.

@sunnyjim1355

5 жыл бұрын

Sadly now it's a monument to the betrayal of the British people by Socialist fifth columnists... think that's nonsense? Brexit.

My favourite description of Turing is '"What you realise when you get to know a genius well,’’ said the veteran Bletchley Park codebreaker Peter Hilton, “is that there is all the difference between a very intelligent person and a genius. With very intelligent people, you talk to them, they come out with an idea, and you say to yourself… I could have had that idea. You never had that feeling with Alan Turing at all. He constantly surprised you with the originality of his thinking. He was marvellous.’’' Hilton was somewhat underplaying his own intelligence there, he was a genius in his own right and was recruited for Bletchley at 18 years old, but Turing was next level genius, truly one of a kind.

@Mr.Monta77

4 жыл бұрын

John Bull I have that being said to me often. «Oh you bloody genius!»

Who they didn't mention was Thomas Flowers. An incredible man who actually designed the Colossus.

@peterfireflylund

7 жыл бұрын

Or Tutte, who figured out how Lorenz/Tunny worked.

@liamanderson8789

7 жыл бұрын

Franco Martinez shouldn't Tom flowers be the father of computing then?

@vincenthunter1615

6 жыл бұрын

He deserved to be very much remembered although from what I know he took much more of an engineering role designing the computer rather than actually thinking about the workings of the enigma machine and the super computer. So maybe he should be remembered as the doctor or midwife of computer he wasn't involved in the initial conception but without him the baby may never have been born.

@MichaelGGarry

6 жыл бұрын

Turing is known as the father of computing for more than just this, he came up with his theoretical "Turing machine" as a paper mental exercise much much earlier, as well as being one of the fathers of AI - hence the still standing Turing test for AI trying to pass itself off as human. His pre-war work also influenced that of von Neumann, the Hungarian working in the USA, who's work we still use today in modern computers with the von Neumann architecture as well as his work and support in statistics with the Monte Carlo Method, which he was an early supporter. Tommy Flowers is sadly overlooked though, possibly because as mentioned he was an engineer rather than a mathematician, not one of the Oxbridge set, but he also paid for the Colossus out of his own pocket iirc, then at the end of the war went back to his job at the Post Office where he tried to convince them that this thing called a "computer" could help them out in massive ways, but wasn't allowed to tell them that he had already built one that basically helped win the bloody war! The UK is so backward at times.

@jwvandegronden

5 жыл бұрын

Michael Garry ~ That is an awesome piece of history!! Thanks for that backdrop against which this all evolved!

I love this side of QI. You don't see it very often, but it'd great when it does show up.

@SuperSundae

Жыл бұрын

*it's

Yet again Stephen, perfect pronounciation of a polish word! Great effort. Respect! 💪👍👏

@hellelujahh

4 жыл бұрын

Wrong accent on "Marian" (should be the first syllable), but other than that - really good job! 🙂

@lmm2103

2 жыл бұрын

He's of polish decent

Actually, an engineer called Tommy Flowers and his team built the Colossus computer at Bletchley Park, which was the first programmable computer as far as I know and contained 1000 values. It is a sad fact that Mr Flowers rarely gets a mention.

@songcramp66

2 жыл бұрын

The Z3 was built in Germany at least 2 years before the Colossus and not even a year after the Americans built ENIAC which was far superior but Colossus' contribution to the war and especially Turing's theories on computers were unequivocal.

The Enigma machines were actually electro-mechanical ciphers. You would set them by moving three rotors into position (each with letters A-Z printed on them) which each produced simple substitution ciphers and connecting pairs of jacks (each with a letter) on a plugboard, which performed a sort of double-substitution between letters of each pair. The addition of the plugboard forced Polish cryptanalysts to develop electro-mechanical computers to rapidly guess combinations, including the "bomba". The addition of two more rotors from the original three (in common use mostly in the German navy) forced Poland to seek help from the wealthier and stabler UK and France. The UK eventually built the much larger "bombe," and had sufficient personnel to handle the tenfold increase in complexity the new rotors created. The US later developed its own machines on different principles. In total, the final enigma machine had a keyspace of around 1.6×10²⁰, which is to say that there are about that many ways an operator could set it up. But from the standpoint of an eavesdropper, the problem is even harder, since whenever a new model is introduced, you don't know how it is configured, and later models even allowed operators to change the setting of the entry wheel. In practice, machines of that era certainly could not actually make that many guesses, and instead exploited cryptographic weaknesses in the design of the machine. Incredibly, these details were worked out by Polish cryptanalysts long before any had seen (or read a description of) an actual machine.

@lawrencedoliveiro9104

3 жыл бұрын

A major weakness of the Enigma, even leaving aside poor choice of secret keys, was that partial guesses about the rotors and plugboard would make the ciphertext look less and less random. So you could refine those initial guesses with better and better ones until you had cracked the whole thing. Basically it is telling you “you’re getting warm”. Modern ciphers don’t do that. More details here kzread.info/dash/bejne/hK6LpJejfJi4iJM.html

@EebstertheGreat

3 жыл бұрын

@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 You need to correctly guess the rotor and ring positions to get those partial matches, but yes, the plugboard didn't have enough connections. But there were much bigger problems like reusing keys, using known headers, and sometimes even resending identical messages encrypted with different keys. The fact that a letter could not map to itself was also a critical flaw that the Germans overlooked.

@WaterCrane

10 ай бұрын

The biggest cryptographic flaw in Enigma, and I think Lorenz too, is that a plaintext letter can never encrypt to itself, so a T in a ciphertext will never represent an actual T, for example. It might not sound like much, but if you have phrases that are known to appear (e.g. "WETTERBERICHT" was a common one for a weather report) or a consistent formatting of how messages are composed, you can position the word against the ciphertext and work out where it can definitely not appear (due to a letter lining up) and where it could appear. In modern cryptographic terms, this is essentially a "known plaintext attack".

"Give them what they want" gave me goosebumps.

The Triple X cypher machine used by the British army was based on Enigma. My uncle used one in Malaya in the 1950’s while he was in the Royal Signals.

Is no one else absolutely confounded every time you see Jo's glasses

@GoodKingMort

4 жыл бұрын

Absolutely terrible glasses 😅

I honestly think that Stephen Fry is the most interesting person I've ever heard, he knows so much about such a huge range of subjects.

@trueaussie9230

2 жыл бұрын

And what he doesn't know he reads of the auto cue or has fed to him via his earpiece.

@itsamindgame9198

Жыл бұрын

You do know there was an entire team of researchers that both briefed him before the show and fed most of what he was to say into his earpiece, right?

I went to Bletchley Park yesterday for my Birthday... yep, that's the type of 29-year old I am. I agree with Stephen wholeheartedly - It is definitely worth visiting. There is quite a lot to see and all in very beautiful grounds. You get a free audiovisual guide, which is like having an iPhone full of videos, giving you the best information about every site. Of course, it's not for everyone. But, for some of us, it's mindblowing.

QI is very funny and has some excellent comedians on, but some of its best moments are the most poignant

Very good, not many realize it was the Polish who cracked the basics of the enigma.

@pphyjynx8217

6 жыл бұрын

well, pre-1939 enigma anyway.

@Sanderus

6 жыл бұрын

The methods used by Poles were still valid after the break out of the war. And Poles were the first ones to crack the code after the the war began. BP created and updated version of so called Zygalski sheets (invented by a Polish cryptoanalyst Henryk Zygalski) according to Polish documentation which Polish Cypher Bureau handed over to the British. However the British were stuck, they couldn't do it. They thought that the method was rendered useless by another modification of Enigma. Indeed another modification was made but the method was still valid. Alan Turing visited Marian Rejewski in Paris carrying the sheets. And Rejewski discovered what changes were made and broke the code.

@Avignon_Pope

2 жыл бұрын

@@pphyjynx8217 "well, anyway" you like it or not, they did it and you have to deal with it.

What a lot of people don't "seem" to realize Is that you don't crack a code like enigma You have to crack it every time it changes You need a "process" The UBoat codes (rotors and their starting positions) which were the ones most associated with Benchly Park, changed every night at midnight So at midnight the code breakers had to start their process They had a few hints UBoats sent in standardized weather reports If there was a ship in that area (so you had to triangulate the position sent) they could request the same information in that format And that "might" give you 3 to 10 pairs (b is t and L is r) then you applied the basic code breaking strategies (single letters are I or A) And by elimination, every pair you coupled reduced the variables for the other pairs Eventually you loaded it all into the "Bombe(s)" (the computer) and let it crunch out the remainder of the pairs Some days they had the code by 9am And some days they never got it But...at midnight...you started all over again The diplomatic rotors were changed weekly And some military admin rotors only changed monthly So those were also cracked...but were lower priority And once cracked you could still use the information sent a day or so ago And those almost always signed off "Hiel Hitler" Which gave you your first pairings

@SuperSundae

Жыл бұрын

I bet you're a hoot at dinner parties.

One of my fave bits. David had some fantastic gags.

I looked at David's shirt, and immediately thought, "I'll bet he's started going out with Victoria and she got him that very un-David-like shirt".

@Jamie-gs3yp

3 жыл бұрын

It's so noteworthy though as to be not noteworthy.

@statosphereonline2008

2 жыл бұрын

It makes him look handsome, like a policeman. Good thing he doesn't have chairman Mao on his shirt, though. He was responsible for the deaths of 60 million people.

I've been to Bletchley and it is fascinating.

Stephen Fry is fascinating to listen to. QI is full of interesting & humorous facts.

“oh superb” this made me laugh out loud

The person who actually came up with the idea for COLOSSUS, was a Post Office engineer, called Tommy Flowers.

@professornuke7562

3 жыл бұрын

Turing's machine, Bombe was, I believe made on the back of what the Poles did, and was a bunch of wheels. Tommy Flowers came up with his design out of his own head, and had to fund a lot of it out of his own pocket.

@BedsitBob

3 жыл бұрын

@@professornuke7562 He had to fund *all* of it, out of his own pocket. After the war, he was awarded £1,000, which barely covered the money he spent on building it.

@lawrencedoliveiro9104

3 жыл бұрын

Bombe was part of a different project from Colossus. Read Gordon Welchman’s _The Hut 6 Story_ for more about that.

@hughtierneytierney3585

3 жыл бұрын

Colossus was built to break the Lorenz cypher; something entirely different from the enigma code.

@bmac8993

3 жыл бұрын

Think Tommy flowers was shown the bombe and said straight off that he could build better. Think he managed that alright.

Alan Turing spent some of his childhood where I live. St Leonards on Sea, Sussex. We have a plaque. The way post war England repaid him for his contribution in saving hundreds of thousands of lives was infamous.

I may be completely wrong but I understood that the first message from German High Command was a weather report so the Allies knew the weather conditions and could then workout the settings from that.

Enigma had a flaw, an 'Achilles heel'. No letter was ever encrypted by the machine as itself, so whatever the letter was in the encrypted text, the cryptographers knew that it was not that letter in the plain text. This knowledge was, apparently, immensely important.

@rin_etoware_2989

5 ай бұрын

James Grime over on Numberphile demonstrated the flaw wonderfully. but in short, it meant that: - you could use a regularly-broadcasted phrase (like "shippingforecast"), - align it next to some portion of the encrypted text (like "waicamszuoepaewq"), - and if any of the letters match up between the two (which is true in this example), that encrypted portion will NEVER translate to the regularly-broadcasted phrase, and you just saved a fair bit of time and computing power.

Whenever David Mitchell talks about history I half expect it to cut to his inner monologue

@akatizzle1585

3 жыл бұрын

I'm doing it, Dad, I'm studying Ancient History and there's not a thing you can do

I'm so proud to be Head of Computer Science at Sherborne School where Turing went to school.

@Finsternis..

3 жыл бұрын

So, what did you teach the man?

@dgw1970

3 жыл бұрын

@@Finsternis.. um... I'd need to be very very old now if I'd taught him.

@Finsternis..

3 жыл бұрын

@@dgw1970 So what are you proud about?

Extraordinarily well-kept secret. Nobody spilled the beans about British decrypts until the information was declassified in 1974.

The Poles broke the actual code itself- they wore out the maths for it, they created the machines to break it, all of it. But when the germans improved the code, they simply added more variations- the principle of how it worked, how to brake it, etc was the same- it only took longer to decode and needed new bigger machines build to adjust, which the Polish guys already knew how to do- only by then Poland was being overrun by Germans and Russians, so they didn't have the finances nor especially the security to do so themself. They literally met with Turing, in fact, thought him how the code worked and how to break it, give him the machine they used (called bomba- even back then) and explained how he needs to improve on it to build the new one. He deserves credit for the actual work he has done with carrying it out and capturing and providing the invaluable intelligence for the war effort- but as far as the science of it goes, he didn't actually do any of the heavy lifting.

@mandolinic

3 жыл бұрын

That's unfair to Turing. The system that the Poles used relied on a "mistake" in the Germans' coding protocol. The signaller had to create a "unique" 3 letter message key and use the daily key to send it at the start of the message. However, the protocol was to send it twice - that was the mistake. The Poles and the British used this redundancy to break the system. But eventually the Germans changed the system so the key was only sent once. It was Turing who broke this new system; he realised that the Enigma could never code a letter to itself, so if there was a "crib" (such as the standard text that appeared in every weather forecast) it was possible to guess where this might appear in the message, and then use the new style bombes he designed to determine the rotor settings. Once the first message was cracked, the rest of the day's stuff was open. That is all down to Turing, but of course it was only possible because the British used the Poles' work to create a massive library of prior messages so knew what to look for. It really helped that the Germans sent a stereotypical weather forecast every morning!

That is an easy one. It was Mr. E. Nigma, later on known as the riddler.

@schusterlehrling

4 жыл бұрын

Mrs. Enigma, actually. A bit of classic education would be useful.

@hebl47

4 жыл бұрын

@@schusterlehrling While some classic education is indeed useful, it doesn't hurt to also know a bit of modern (20th century) culture. So that you can get the reference to the Batman comics.

@MrSpruce

4 жыл бұрын

@@schusterlehrling It's interesting to see you miss the mark.

@bredrick.

4 жыл бұрын

@@schusterlehrling Nope, it was quite clearly Edward Nygma.

@schusterlehrling

4 жыл бұрын

@@hebl47 you should know the classical foundations, not the comic book education. Or you mistake wrong with right and men with women like here.

No mention either of Bill Tutte. This is from Wikipedia: William Thomas "Bill" Tutte OC FRS FRSC (14 May 1917 - 2 May 2002) was a British codebreaker and mathematician. During the Second World War, he made a brilliant and fundamental advance in cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. Tutte's breaking of the Lorenz code has been called the greatest intellectual achievement of the second world war.

The invention of the computer truly changed our life. Who would have thought these weird large metal mechanic parts and lightbulbs would be developed so far. So far, that we now have these small devices with greater processing power than rooms full of hardware, available in everyone's pocket. Truly astonishing

Thank you for sharing this really interesting discussion.

Love stephen fry

I could listen to Stephen Fry all day.

@48sydney

5 жыл бұрын

He's only reading a script. He did good Audio books of the Harry Potter series.

Truly mesmerizing British history.

Alan Turing wasn't directly involved with inventing Colossus. That was Tommy Flowers. Turing was in America by that stage of the war.

I think that this is the most somber segment of any QI episode. Irony is most evidently evoked but there are no cheap shots at humour.

It was actually one of the largest Poles alive at the time who did the very last bit, but it was a man from Madagascar who never got the proper credit for his achievements. He thought to himself "Hmmm ... what if ... I touch that damn enigma with a ten foot Pole?"

Turing had nothing to do with Colossus . It was Bill Tutte that worked how the Lorenze SZ20 worked , and Tommy Flowers designed and built Colossus

One of the greatest things about being British is that we can belittle ourselves whilst quietly punching way above our weight.

@bbb462cid

3 жыл бұрын

all the while being modest, I see

such an informative show with comedy wow!

The answer was 42.

One of those shows which restore my faith in humanity.

'Indeed, I'm already moist.' I just nearly spat my tea up the wall hearing that xD

@sunnyjim1355

5 жыл бұрын

So you found a blatantly misandric comment funny. Well done you, bigot.

Yeah the bite out of the apple is just there to distinguish it from a cherry.

I learned something new about something old, today.

This might have been said before.. although Alan Turing did make a huge contribution at Bletchley Park, there were several other brilliant people who made great breakthroughs too - Turing had nothing to do with the actual design of the Colossus computer, for example.

I do love Jo’s specs

No one ever mentions Tommy Flowers who designed and built Collosus

the story behind them giving the details to the US is pretty interesting, kinda shows the real extant of the 'special relationship.'

That made me really emotional

Oh superb.

I find it interesting that even today there is still almost no discussion of the encryption methods that the Allies used and what success (or not) the Axis had at breaking it.

@herrbonk3635

4 жыл бұрын

And even today they seldom mention that there were real computers before the colossus. Such as the Z1/Z2/Z3 mechanical and electro-magnetical series of computers by Konrad Zuse. He developed the first machine in 1935-39 and it was functionally stable in early 1941. It worked in binary (unlike Babbage and Eniac) and was fully programmable. It implemented binary based floating point arithmetic with mantissa and exponent in hardware, much like modern computers.

It's a shame there is no mention of Gordon Welchman. Without his involvement is increasing the speed of calculations of the code breaking machine, Enigma may never have been cracked. A genius and fellow student alongside Turing he too was hounded by the powers that be when years later he tried to publish a book about his work at Bletchley. It led to his loss of security clearance and role with the NSA and he was almost prosecuted under the same legislation as Snowden. Perhaps you could consider a revisit of this segment to shine a light on his achievements and prevent him being sidelined?

I was so sure Alan Davies was going to buzz and say Alan Turing. Pleasantly surprised.

I agree with Stephen that Bletchley Park is well worth a visit, and the tickets are a bit pricey but last a year, so you can go back for free again and again if you want. But..... Take snacks and drinks, or stop at a cafe just before you get there. The prices in the tea rooms around Bletchley Park are shocking. I bought two cups of tea, ordinary tea, served in big paper disposable cups, in the tea room next to the main building, and they cost £5.40. For two cups of tea.

When the Nazis found out that the Enigma was calculated that had to add 2 more rotors to the machine. The first computer or 2 computers had 19kb of memory each to work with during World War 2.

@schusterlehrling

4 жыл бұрын

That was also cracked within a few weeks.

@chrisbodum3621

4 жыл бұрын

windows or mac ?

@Thurgosh_OG

4 жыл бұрын

@@chrisbodum3621 ZX Spectrum

The Geheimschreiber was also broken by the Swedes. The comunication lines from Norway passed through Sweden.

@Nexus42

7 жыл бұрын

The Swedish actually did plenty of things during the war, but specifically avoided the whole killing aspect of it. They took in tons of refugees from neighbouring countries and helped them out a bunch, but of course kept it all under wraps.

@DomWeasel

7 жыл бұрын

Not sure selling all that iron ore to the Germans who turned it into war materiel specifically avoided the 'killing aspect' of it.

@Nexus42

7 жыл бұрын

Direct participation in the war effort then. If they hadn't sold the iron, the Germans would've probably just taken it by force anyway.

@Cronuz2

7 жыл бұрын

This conversation led me to read about sweeden during the war. And im quite amazed by the good work sweeden did to stop nazi germany.

@razzledazzle7776

7 жыл бұрын

Shadownet Spy without the 'killing aspect' them refugees would be dead along with Sweden being invaded.

Shame they missed the opportunity to mention Bill Tutte and Tommy Flowers - they has a much more important role in cracking Lorenz and building Colossus than Turing.

2:40, “it isn’t true, but god we wish it were”. If you’ve ever wondered what the subjunctive is, his use of “were” instead of “was” there, is a perfect example of it

@birdvideos9085

4 жыл бұрын

Brilliant observation!

alan turing....the new face of the £50 note.....well played sir.....well played

God bless Tommy Flowers, he built the dam thing and never gets a mention. And while I'm here God bless Bill Tutt and who cracked Tunny.

@rosiefay7283

5 жыл бұрын

The TUNNY cipher is also known as Lorenz. and btw William Tutte (with an e).

@kasiorexg4806

4 жыл бұрын

And god bless the Polish who really cracked the code and nether Tommy flowers or Alan Turing would have gotten anywhere without

@nikos327

3 жыл бұрын

@@rosiefay7283 I'm going to be a little pedantic here - Lorenz was the German name for their High Command Cipher system. TUNNY was the covername that the British code crackers gave to the intercepted cipher created by a Lorenz machine.

We've got a ZX-80 on it, that one cracked me up LOL. For those who were born too late: the ZX-80 was a 1 MHz 8 bit computer with 1,024 bytes of RAM.

good book on the subject- Seizing the Enigma

@Bialy_1

4 жыл бұрын

"Up to July 25, 1939, the Poles had been breaking Enigma messages for over six and a half years without telling their French and British allies. On December 15, 1938, two new rotors, IV and V, were introduced (three of the now five rotors being selected for use in the machine at a time). As Rejewski wrote in a 1979 critique of appendix 1, volume 1 (1979), of the official history of British Intelligence in the Second World War, "we quickly found the [wirings] within the [new rotors], but [their] introduction [...] raised the number of possible sequences of drums from 6 to 60 [...] and hence also raised tenfold the work of finding the keys. Thus the change was not qualitative but quantitative. We would have had to markedly increase the personnel to operate the bombs, to produce the perforated sheets (60 series of 26 sheets each were now needed, whereas up to the meeting on July 25, 1939, we had only two such series ready) and to manipulate the sheets."" Polish did not care about German Navy enigma because Poland at the time got only 50km of coast and from both side of that coast we got Germans... But because of that it is good reason to brag how "we broke the most important part of the code"... The reality is that there was no significal German navy battle during this whole long war ... And in the topic of U-boats it was much more important that Polish engineer Wacław Struszyński was able to create antena reliable that was also small enough to fit it on a ship and thanks to that German u-boats was located by Allied ships when ever they were making any transmision. Germans to the end was thinking that it will be not posible to build antena like that(just like in case of cracking enigma). btw. the one significant battle with Bismarck was posible thanks to Polish destroyer ORP Piorun that found it and made first shots at him(but in British sources we can read that all shots was a miss, funy how British know that even when Polish sailors claiming that only first salvo was a miss...). If you want to learn real history then start with Polish book as first 13 years was done only by Polish, French and British was not even trying as they considered the job imposible until Polish invited them to Poland to show them what we have...

"Not named after your dog surely?" *awkward laugh* We've got 'im boys...

No mention of Tommy flowers who built that computer

@mungolikescandy3270

7 жыл бұрын

its a shame, he designed and made the first electronic computer and he got a mbe, a adult education centre (now closed) and a road named after him. he tried to get a loan to build another computer after the war but the bank didn't believe such a machine could work

@BedsitBob

7 жыл бұрын

Yes indeed, no mention of him. The road around the place where Alan Turing was born, is named after him, but the road around where Tommy Flowers was born, is called the M25.

@styot

7 жыл бұрын

When he was going for that loan I bet he couldn't tell them about the computer he already built because it was classified!

@lycian123

7 жыл бұрын

He worked at Dollis Hill Research for the then Post Office before a new centre was built at Adastral Park (originally known simply as 'Martlesham') by BT (then British Telecom). They have a bronze bust of him there which you cannot miss when you go into the staff restaurant building.

@hanstun1

6 жыл бұрын

Lots of things named after him including a street. He also lived a long and full life and seems to have been a pretty normal and well adjusted guy. In other words not great material for imagination and inspiration no matter how important he might have been. Turing on the other hand ....

I always thought it was Dougray Scott. No mention of Turing at all in that version of the story. Technically that makes it Turing Incomplete.

Fry asked Woz : this is why Fry is so epic.

I see jo brand used her repertory of joke "I'm already moist" she's so funny.

@jac627

4 жыл бұрын

@@lotuspotus2213 Her face looks like someone's already had a go.

The most amazing thing about this clip is that David Mitchell knows what a ZX-80 is bwahahahaha

I think they forgot to mention Tommy Flowers, the GPO engineer who's idea it was to use valves instead of relays to build the computer. I think his contribution is overshadowed by Alan Turing.

The movie is fantastic

Alan Turing is such a brilliant man to me that I got an encrypted tattoo of his surname, in pride colours ending with a semi colon (for both his suicide and bc he's the father of modern computing) 😍 if it wasn't for his work at bletchley park, i would never have found out my love for computing

@IndigoIndustrial

2 жыл бұрын

You might not have been born, if your antecedants were in the area of conflict.

I am so glad that the credit is given where it is due. Imitation Game is a smear on history. However not taking away anything from Turing, He was a brilliant man himself. It was the Polish who cracked the Enigma first.

@neildahlgaard-sigsworth3819

7 жыл бұрын

Tomek92ful true they did break the pre-August 1939 versions of the Enigma code, but then the Germans went and change the code and most of the work that the Poles had done was no longer useful and so Station X had to virtually start from scratch.

@RafFalin

7 жыл бұрын

Neil , Not true. The "know how" was the same. German added more rotors to the machine increasing number of combinations and time to brake it. Poles had built 6 machines to brake the code, after adding more rotors by germans they would need 64 such a machines. It was to expensive for cyptology department at this time, but it was just a matter of money. After war started polish cryptologist gave all their work and "know how" to the bBritts. Britts just upgraded process and built great first computer machine which speed up the process, but whithout polish mathematicians they woudn't probably crack the code in next 10 years cause they were using old approach to crack codes not advanced math with permutations like Poles.

@davidw.2791

6 жыл бұрын

Tomek92ful I thought they dis pay tribute to the fact. They presented that brave Polish spies stole one of those machines, now it's up to this British mathematician group to crack the code itself.

@Ruminations09

6 жыл бұрын

The movie literally acknowledges that fact that the Polish cracked it first. In the movie, that was the inspiration that gave Turing the idea for the machine.

@fuzzyscarfandmittens4772

6 жыл бұрын

At least it's not the movie "U-571" where it's a bunch of Americans wind up stealing the Enigma machine from a German U boat when in reality it was the British who accomplished this. But then you remember it's an American movie and they need to be the heroes in everything.

The Colossus project waa managed by Max Newman and the (valve) electronics by Tommy Flowers. Turing was not involved in the Colossus project. Turing worked with a mechanical computer called Bombe to decrypt the enigma code.

I went to that statue 2 weeks ago and KZread recommended this video.

@adamsmithintin2803

5 жыл бұрын

If you had your phone with you then there's data somewhere that knows you were there

Tut, tut, tut,... the Lorenz cypher was indeed broken by Colossus the first ELECTRONIC computer... but it was designed by Tommy Flowers an Electrical Engineer and not Alan Turing (Alan developed Bombe which decrypted Enigma). Alan was a great man and hand in important role in WWII and history but so did Tommy... he always seems to get ignored.

@Sanderus

6 жыл бұрын

I get the feeling that everybody gets ignored other than Turing. And Turing was a brilliant mind but definitely not the only one.

@GotWrackspurts

6 жыл бұрын

Matthew Lodge it doesn't help the flowers wasn't able to discuss his work on colossus for several decades after it and went back to the telephone industry whereas Turing went on to design computers, like the first one for Manchester university

i really miss QI with Steven fry, to me that was comedy.

*TOP MAN!*

Ahum, Konrad Zuse build the world's first programmable computer; the functional program-controlled Turing-complete Z3 became operational in May 1941.