Geek Beats Colossus

An amateur cryptographer deciphered a coded message faster than the WWII Colossus computer.

They’d called it the Cipher Challenge. Could the rebuilt Colossus code breaker – an early computer – work faster than a virtual machine or someone using modern software?   Friday provided the answer, and it wasn’t great news for the machine originally built over 60 years ago. It was beaten both by a German amateur, Joachim Schuth, who’d written his own software for the project, and also by a ‘virtual Colossus’ loaded on a modern computer.   Sunspots meant that the message wasn’t loaded onto Colossus until 08:55 GMT on Friday, with the results coming through at 13:15 – after a heart-in-the-mouth moment before the final run when two valves blew. The virtual Colossus had the answer by the middle of the morning, but even that lagged behind Schuth, who’d cracked the code on Thursday night, well before Colossus began work.   "He has written a suite of software specifically for the challenge," said Andy Clark, one of the founders of the Trust for the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, told the BBC. The rebuilt Colossus is at Bletchley Park.   The coded text is available on the Museum’s web site, letting all those with a will – and software – to have a chance at cracking it.