German man beats WWII Colossus code cracker
In an ironic twist, a British team operating a World War II code-breaking computer has been beaten in a cipher-breaking contest by a German.
In the Cipher Challenge, a competition run by the U.K.'s National Museum of Computing on Thursday and Friday, the cipher-breaking computer Colossus had to decode encrypted radio communications intercepted from Paderborn in Germany. Competing against Colossus, which took 14 years to rebuild, were radio enthusiasts from across Europe, who had to beat the WWII code cracker using whatever computing means they had at their disposal.
The winner was Joachim Schüth, from Bonn, who completed the task using software he wrote himself.
"(Schüth) cracked the most difficult code yesterday," the museum's representative said Friday. "We're absolutely delighted. He used specially written software for the challenge. Colossus is still chugging away, as we got the signals late. Yesterday the atmospheric conditions were such that we couldn't get good signals."
