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How have I never heard of the Enigma Machine before? This is crazy fascinating to me
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine
https://blog.digitalocean.com/how-2000-droplets-broke-the-enigma-code-in-13-minutes/
A grateful reporter whose father-in-law liberated a concentration camp after D-Day reports on a high-tech team that "accomplished in 13 minutes what took Alan Turing years to do — and at a cost of just $7."
"In late 2017, at the Imperial War Museum in London, developers applied modern AI techniques to break the 'unbreakable' Enigma machine used by the Nazis to encrypt their correspondences in World War II."
Two Polish co-founders of a company called Enigma Pattern decided to honor Alan Turing's ground-breaking work at Bletchley Park, where Turing had automated the testing of over 15 billion possible passwords each day by building what's considered the first modern computer. They took the problem to a modern cloud infrastructure provider, renting what one describes as "2,000 minions that do the tedious work" — specifically, crunching 41 million combinations each second — using Grimm's Fairy Tales to train an algorithm to recognize when they had found a commonly-used German word (including familiar bedtime stories like Hansel & Gretl and Rumpelstiltskin). "In the end the AI could not understand German. But it did what machine learning does best: recognize patterns."
"After 13 minutes of minion work, boom! The new Bombe had broken the code."
Turing's birthday is Saturday — and it's nice to see him being remembered so fondly. |
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| There are no conversations. |
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| Umberto Eco |
But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. |
| George Matthew Adams |
Few people wear out before their time. Mostly they rust out, worry out, run out - spill out. A machine must have care and its different parts must be adjusted properly. No machine has ever approached the human machine. When it is right, it is in health. |
| Eddie Campbell |
I remember having an argument with Alan, I said the Queen's not just going to call the guy up and send him out to do it. And Alan says, well, how would a monarch give orders to her assassin. |
| Eddie Campbell |
I'd be interested to read Gull's paper on it, and I wish Alan would put it in somewhere. It gives him a relevance to our times, which he doesn't otherwise have. Gull, I mean, not Alan. |
| Ray Dalio |
Nature is a machine. The family is a machine. The life cycle is like a machine. |
| Frank Gaffney |
History demonstrates that previous military drawdowns invited aggression by our enemies. After World War I, America drew down forces until the U.S. Army had fewer than 100,000 men in uniform. That weakness invited Nazi aggression in Europe and the imperial Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. |
| Andrew Carnegie |
Concentration is my motto - first honesty, then industry, then concentration. |
| Siobhan Fahey |
I have a naturally camp sensibility and a camp sense of humour. I love the icons that gay people love. |
| Peter Ackroyd |
'London' is a gallery of sensation of impressions. It is a history of London in a thematic rather than a chronological sense with chapters of the history of smells, the history of silence, and the history of light. I have described the book as a labyrinth, and in that sense in complements my description of London itself. |
| Queen Elizabeth II |
I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong. |
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Computer Pioneer and Codebreaker Alan Turing To Appear On UK Money (bbc.com)
Computer pioneer and codebreaker Alan Turing will feature on the new design of the Bank of England's 50 pound note. He is celebrated for his code-cracking work that proved vital to the Allies in World War Two. The 50 pound note will be the last of the Bank of England collection to switch from paper to polymer when it enters circulation by the end of 2021. The note was once described as the "currency of corrupt elites" and is the least used in daily transactions. However, there are still 344 million 50 pound notes in circulation, with a combined value of 17.2bn pound, according to the Bank of England's banknote circulation figures. "Alan Turing was an outstanding mathematician whose work has had an enormous impa...
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'We Can't Compete': Universities Are Losing Their Best AI Scientists
The Guardian shares the story of a PhD student at Imperial College London who abruptly stopped coming to the facility, even as he had one-year of studies left. From the story:
Eventually, the professor called him. He had left for a six-figure salary at Apple. "He was offered such a huge amount of money that he simply stopped everything and left," said Maja Pantic, professor of affective and behavioural computing at Imperial. "It's five times the salary I can offer. It's unbelievable. We cannot compete."
It is not an isolat...
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Witold Pilecki
During World War II, he volunteered for a Polish resistance operation to get imprisoned in the Auschwitz death camp in order to gather intelligence and escape. While in the camp, Pilecki organized a resistance movement and as early as 1941, informed the Western Allies of Nazi Germany's Auschwitz atrocities. He escaped from the camp in 1943 after nearly two and a half years of imprisonment. Pilecki took part in the Warsaw Uprising[2] in August 1944.[3] He remained loyal to the London-based Polish government-in-exile after the Soviet-backed communist takeover of Poland and was arrested in 1947 by the Stalinist secret police (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa) on charges of working for "foreign imperialism", thought to be a euphemism for MI6.[4] He was executed after a show trial in 1948....
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It’s possible to build a Turing machine within Magic: The Gathering
Just arrange a series of cascading triggers so players no longer have any choice."
Consider this hypothetical scenario: Bob and Alice are playing a game of Magic: The Gathering. It's normal game play at first, as, say, Filigree robots from Kaladesh face off against werewolves and vampires from Innistrad. But then Alice draws just the right card from her customized deck, and suddenly Bob finds himself caught in the equivalent of a Turing machine, the famed abstract device that can simulate any computer algorithm. Thanks to the peculiarities of the rules of Magic, Bob can now only finish the game when he meets whatever condi...
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Amazon Opens Up Its Internal Machine Learning Training To Everyone
Amazon announced Monday that it's making the machine learning courses it uses to train its engineers available to everybody for free. The course is tailored to four major groups -- developers, data scientists, data platform engineers and business professionals -- and it offers both foundational level lessons as well as more advanced instruction.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/amazons-own-machine-learning-unive...
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“Now, I’m the one getting a lot of my teammates into cryo,” Anderson continued. “With our team in Philly, we’re young and we’re all trying to figure out what’s best for our bodies. Bringing in veterans like JJ [Redick] and Amir [Johnson] will obviously help a lot because they have experience and can offer great advice. But Markelle [Fultz], who is a really good friend of mine, had the same reaction to cryo as I did when I was a rookie; he had heard of it and seen a cryo chamber, but he hadn’t tried it. He’s only 19 years old and, at first, he didn’t see the benefit because he had never played an NBA schedule and had never dealt with the soreness that comes with 82 games. Then, after training camp, he was like, ‘You know what? I’m sore, so let me give this a try.’ Guys on the team are definitely getting more into it and seeing that it helps.”
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This post is a comment.
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Boeing 757 Testing Shows Airplanes Vulnerable To Hacking, DHS Says
A team of government, industry and academic officials successfully demonstrated that a commercial aircraft could be remotely hacked in a non-laboratory setting last year, a DHS official said Wednesday at the 2017 CyberSat Summit in Tysons Corner, Virginia. "We got the airplane on Sept. 19, 2016. Two days later, I was successful in accomplishing a remote, non-cooperative, penetration. [Which] means I didn't have anybody touching the airplane, I didn't have an insider threat. I stood off using typical stuff that could get through security and we were able to establish a presence on the systems of the aircraft." Hickey said the details of the hack and the work his team are doing are classified, but said they accessed the air...
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What a Trip: First Evidence for Higher State of Consciousness Found
Summary: Researchers observe a sustained increase in neural signal diversity in people under the influence of psychedelics.
Source: University of Sussex.
Scientific evidence of a ‘higher’ state of consciousness has been found in a study led by the University of Sussex.
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A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.
Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”
Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked.
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Samsung Made a Bitcoin Mining Rig Out of 40 Old Galaxy S5s
Samsung is starting a new "Upcycling" initiative that is designed to turn old smartphones and turn them into something brand new. Behold, for example, this bitcoin mining rig, made out of 40 old Galaxy S5 devices, which runs on a new operating system Samsung has developed for its upcycling initiative. Samsung premiered this rig, and a bunch of other cool uses for old phones, at its recent developer's conference in San Francisco. Upcycling involves repurposing old devices instead of breaking them down for parts of reselling them. The people at Samsung's C-Lab -- an engineering team dedicated to creative projects -- showed off old Galaxy phones and assorted tablets stripped of Android software and repurposed into a variety of diff...
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