Bletchley: Home of the Codebreakers

Hello everyone- I hope you had a better day than I did (school photos are not fun) (also some of this was written a few days ago, so I did not actually have school photos today).

So, a few days ago now, I went to Bletchley Park with some people from school and it was pretty amazing.

Perhaps some context is needed. Basically, six people from my year (including myself) won two sections of a science challenge, and our big prize was to go to Bletchley Park.

Yay!

(My sister also won, with two other people in her year)

Yeah, so I went to Bletchley Park. We had a guided tour first of all, although we didn't actually see that much, and then we got to wander around a couple of the huts for a bit. Then we did a codebreaking session, which was pretty cool.

I worked with one of my friends, and my sister worked with my other friend (afterwards we decided that she's far too good at codebreaking for her own good...). I worked out that I prefer a monoalphabetic cipher to a teleprinter cipher.

A monoalphabetic cipher basically swaps each letter for another random one, and it was pretty fun to work out which letter was which.

A teleprinter cipher is this weird thing to do with amounts of dots in five lines, and if you have the key it is very easy to crack (although there are no spaces, which makes reading it a bit harder).

Oh, and we also 'found' my dad! There was a load of pictures of Bletchley Park when it was operating, and suddenly my friend pokes me and there's a man standing in the back of the photo that looks rather like my dad does...creepy.

Although I suppose, he'd fit right it. Great at maths and computing-stuff, and his brain doesn't quite work in the same way that most people's do.

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But it's amazing, what they did there, from both a historical point of view and from a mathematical point of view. The fact that they managed to break Enigma and Lorenz is amazing in itself, but to do it and keep it a secret for so long?

Brilliant.

What I love most (apart from the history that is exciting enough) is that apparently, after the war ended, Britain gave its allies Enigma machines, telling them that it was unbreakable, but, of course, reading all messages sent.

Even more brilliant.

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I leave you with a quote from Alan Turing himself: "Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine."

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