The complexity of the Enigma Machine
The basic 3 rotor Enigma machine has 26 * 26 * 26 = 17,576
possible rotor states for
each of the 6 wheel orders,
giving 6 * 17,576 = 105,456 machine states.
The stecker board adds an extra 1,500,000,000,000 combinations.
Total combinations are thus 150,000,000,000,000,000,000
This is the task facing anyone trying to decipher a particular message.
The Germans considered the task to be impossible, certainly even a modern computer
would take a few years to work through this number of combinations searching for the
original machine settings.
Bletchley Park, the home of the wartime code breakers, who deciphered the messages from the German Enigma machines.
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