Enigma with a vengeance

I wrote the last post in a flight of euphoria over having finished the enigma machine. This feeling was squashed completely in the next day or so when our lecturer released some test answers and my encryption turned out to be completely wrong (it did encrypt, but not to the same pattern as the enigma machine). This is part of an apparently common phenomenon that is experienced by many a programmer – that you feel like the boss in one minute, and like a complete imbecile the next. Anyway, I had real problems figuring out the correct mechanics of it until I actually built my own enigma machine with paper dials. It didn’t feel exactly glamorous as I went to work with crayons and scissors, but at least shortly after I managed to crack the damn thing. Final hand-in was 2 days ago, so we’ll see how it turns out! On a side note, it turned out that the Science Museum (which is located right next to Imperial College) had a year-long exhibition on Alan Turing (indirectly referenced in my previous post), where they actually had 3 enigma machines on show! Of course when I went to finally check out said exhibition, I was informed that it had closed a couple of weeks ago…. sad face.