Man honored for beating computer
 
Jan 27, 2008
 
A German software engineer has been honoured by the National Museum of Computing for deciphering an encrypted radio message faster than Colossus, the British Second World War code-cracking computer.
 
Joachim Schueth, from Bonn, won the National Museum of Computing's Cipher Challenge on November 15 last year.
 
He received his prize, which includes a valve from the working Colossus at the museum, in Block H at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, the wartime home of Colossus.
 
Using his laptop, Mr Schueth unravelled a code transmitted from the Heinz Nixdorf Museum in Paderborn, Germany, from a Lorenz SZ42 Cipher machine, used by the German High Command to relay secret messages during the war.
 
He was competing against other amateur code-breakers, as well as a Colossus Mark II computer, which has been painstakingly rebuilt over the past 14 years by a team of experts led by Tony Sale, a founder of the National Museum of Computing.
 
While the bus-sized Colossus whirred, clicked and clunked for three hours and 15 minutes before successfully unravelling the Lorenz code, Mr Schueth, using a program he wrote specifically for the Cipher Challenge, completed the task in just 46 seconds.
 
Mr Schueth said: "It was unfair because I was using a modern PC, while Colossus was created more than 60 years ago. It really is astonishing and humbling that the world's first programmable, digital computer was created in the 1940s. Without those Bletchley Park pioneers, I would be out of a job.
 
"My laptop digested ciphertext at a speed of 1.2 million characters per second - 240 times faster than Colossus. If you scale the CPU frequency by that factor, you get an equivalent clock of 5.8 MHz for Colossus. That is a remarkable speed for a computer built in 1944. Even 40 years later many computers did not reach that speed. So the Cipher Challenge would have been very much closer had it taken place 20 years ago."
 
Ten Colossus machines were built in the 1940s. They helped shorten the conflict by many months, securing Allied victory and saving many thousands of lives in the process.
 
Such was the secrecy surrounding the Colossus computers at the time that their very existence was kept secret and scant details about them did not begin to emerge until the 1970s.