An interesting distributed computing project has reportedly cracked one of the Enigma cyphers used by the Germans during World War II. The M4 Message Breaking Project, founded in January by an amateur German cryptographer, harnesses the processing power of a wide network of computers in order to do in one months what the likes of Alan Turing and his Bletchley Park colleagues failed to do at all.

The decoded messages were enciphered using the Enigma machine, a device used by German U-boats to send text messages from the North Atlantic to German navy headquarters. The cyphertext was produced by setting a series of rotors and applying a ‘plugboard’.

The original, encyphered message, was as follows:

NCZWV USXPN YMINH ZXMQX SFWXW LKJAH SHNMC
OCCAK UQPMK CSMHK SEINJ USBLK IOSXC KUBHM
LLXCS JUSRR DVKOH ULXWC CBGVL IYXEO AHXRH
KKFVD REWEZ LXOBA FGYUJ QUKGR TVUKA MEURB
VEKSU HHVOY HABCJ WMAKL FKLMY FVNRI ZRVVR
TKOFD ANJMO LBGFF LEOPR GTFLV RHOWO PBEKV
WMUQF MPWPA RMFHA GKXII BG

Decoded, and translated to English, this reads:

F T 1132/19 contents:
Forced to submerge during attack.
Depth charges. Last enemy position 0830h
AJ 9863, [course] 220 degrees, [speed] 8 knots.
[I am] following [the enemy].
[barometer] falls 14 mb, [wind] nor-nor-east,
[force] 4, visibility 10 [nautical miles].
Looks

It turns out that Hartwig Looks was the captain of a U-264 and among the 52 survivors of a depth charge attack by two British sloops, the HMS Woodpecker and HMS Starling, on 19 February 1944. Very interesting indeed.