Cool: Help solve unbroken Nazi Enigma ciphers!

Started by Mike, Feb 26 06 07:23

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Mike

Woudn't it be cool to be able to say that your PC  helped to crack one of these? [hr style="width: 100%; height: 2px;"][h3]SETI@home-like project to crack unbroken Nazi Enigma ciphers        [/h3]Four of the messages encrypted with the Nazi Enigma machine were never decrypted; a distributed computing project (like SETI@Home) is harnessing the power of the Internet's many computers to break them. One has already been solved! [blockquote]The M4 Project is an effort to break 3 original Enigma messages with the help of distributed computing. The signals were intercepted in the North Atlantic in 1942 and are believed to be unbroken. Ralph Erskinehas presented the intercepts in a letter to the journal Cryptologia.The signals were presumably enciphered with the four rotor Enigma M4 -hence the name of the project.This project has officially started as of January 9th, 2006. You can help out by donating idle time of your computer to the project. If you want to participate, please follow the client install instructions for your operating system...[/p][/blockquote][a href="vny!://www.bytereef.org.nyud.net:8080/m4_project.html"]Link[/a]

primefactor

Other incredibly cool numbers-related news:

On December 15, 2005, Dr. Curtis Cooper and Dr. Steven Boone, professors at [A href="vny!://www.cmsu.edu/index.xml"]Central Missouri State University[/A], discovered the 43rd Mersenne Prime, 230,402,457-1. The [A href="vny!://www.math-cs.cmsu.edu/~gimps/"]CMSU team[/A] is the most prolific contributor to the GIMPS project. The discovery is the [A href="vny!://www.utm.edu/research/primes/largest.html"]largest known prime number[/A].

The new prime is [A href="vny!://www.mersenneforum.org/txt/43.txt"]9,152,052 digits[/A] long. This means the [A href="vny!://www.eff.org/awards/coop.html"]Electronic Frontier Foundation $100,000 award[/A] for the discovery of the first 10 million digit prime is still up for grabs! The new prime was independently verified in 5 days by Tony Reix of Bull S.A. in Grenoble, France using 16 Itanium2 1.5 GHz CPUs of a [A href="vny!://www.bull.com/novascale/hpc.html"]Bull NovaScale 6160 HPC[/A] at Bull Grenoble Research Center, running the [A href="vny!://www.oxixares.com/glucas"]Glucas program[/A] by Guillermo Ballester Valor of Granada, Spain.

Dr. Cooper joined GIMPS over 7 years ago with colleague Dr. Vince Edmondson. Edmondson was instrumental in the campus-wide effort until he passed away in 2003. Cooper, Boone, and CMSU truly earned this discovery, diligently coordinating over 700 PCs!

However, Dr. Cooper and Dr. Boone could not have made this discovery alone. In recognition of contributions made by tens of thousands GIMPS volunteers, credit for this new discovery goes to "Cooper, Boone, Woltman, Kurowski, et al". The discovery is the [A href="vny!://www.mersenne.org/history.htm"]ninth record prime[/A] for the GIMPS project. [A href="vny!://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm"]Join now[/A] and you could find the next record-breaking prime! You could even win some [A href="vny!://www.mersenne.org/prize.htm"]cash[/A].

[A href="vny!://www.perfsci.com/"]Perfectly Scientific[/A], Dr. Crandall's company which developed the FFT algorithm used by GIMPS, will make a [A href="vny!://www.perfsci.com/souvenirs.htm"]poster you can order[/A] containing the entire 9.1 million digit number. It is kind of pricey because accurately printing an over-sized poster in 1-point font is not easy! This makes a cool present for the serious math nut in your family.

For more information on this prime discovery read the [A href="vny!://www.mersenne.org/30402457.htm"]full press release[/A].

Roll up your sleeves and get working on that 10 million digit prime, and a big pile of cash could be yours! GIMPS is the "Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search." Check it out! Wow! (Sorry, I get a little geeked up on numbers...)


TehBorken

Teh intarweb is an amazing place. Who would have ever thought it would be used for something this? Bravo to them!

I've also heard of some cancer research being done in a similar way, using idle PCs to work out chemical structures or something. Seems like incredible stuff is happening these days on a regular basis.
The real trouble with reality is that there's no background music.

kingy

i run boinc on my work computer. it has alot of cool projects that you can sign up for including the [A href="mailto:seti@home"]seti@home[/A] and a few other worthy projects. i mainly run it for the cool screen savers.

[A href="vny!://boinc.berkeley.edu/"]vny!://boinc.berkeley.edu/[/A]
...

TehBorken

Went to the boinc site and saw this on the front page:

One of over 500,000 people worldwide participating in BOINC:                [table border="0" cellpadding="2" width="100%"][tbody][tr][td align="right" bgcolor="#d8e8ff"]        Name[/td][td]        [a href="vny!://boinc.netsoft-online.com/get_user.php?cpid=b79a91087e8a7785bcca9f9a68bd8bb7&html=1"][font size="+1"]PAJTL_Computing[/font][/a][/td][/tr]        [tr][td align="right" bgcolor="#d8e8ff"]        Work done per day[/td]        [td]5,279 (53 GigaFLOPS)[/td][/tr]        [tr][td align="right" bgcolor="#d8e8ff"]Work done total[/td]        [td]1,145,441 [/td][/tr]        [tr][td align="right" bgcolor="#d8e8ff"]Country[/td][td] Australia[/td][/tr]                [tr][td align="right" bgcolor="#d8e8ff"]Team[/td][td] BOINC@AUSTRALIA[/td][/tr][/tbody][/table]
Goddamn, how does someone get ahold of 53 Gigaflops of computing power?
The real trouble with reality is that there's no background music.