The Enigma@Home Project Is Decyphering Remaining WWII Nazi Enigma Messages - Gridcoin Pays You to Help!
The start of July saw the discovery of new, uncracked German submarine messages - now added to the pool of Enigma encoded communications that remain successfully obscured by the Nazi WWII Enigma machine. As a result, the distributed compute project Enigma@Home has officially fired back up in early August to attempt to crack these messages. I would like to invite all of you to join in and help decipher these - if you have a computer, you can help!
Anyone is able to contribute to the decyphering of these messages, by installing the software BOINC. This open source platform allows you to add your computer's computational power to a global network of volunteers. As a collective, this network has incredible compute at its disposal, and works on everything from mapping the Milky Way to identifying child cancer markers. Deciphering Enigma messages is just a small part of what the BOINC network of projects hopes to achieve.
As a Dutch immigrant living in New Zealand, there is a certain degree of patriotism that has driven me to help Enigma@Home by providing computing resources. So much so, that I moved my compute power from mapping the Milky Way and in favour of cracking these massages. Actually, that is only a partial truth - I intended to move my compute power to Enigma for only a week or two as that would be enough time to crack the messages based on previous cracking time and the compute at my disposal. Turns out things are more complex this time around!
Unlike the previous three messages cracked by Enigma@Home in 2006, the current set of messages are late-war naval messages, which adds a forth wheel to the Enigma machine. Add to this that, also unlike the previous sets, there is no indication of any of the wheel settings during encryption, and you have an even bigger problem on your hands. Finally, a pass of the original decoding dictionary yielded no results, so the current decryption dictionary used is far more advanced which eats even more compute power.
As it stands, Engima@Home has completed all Windows work unit test batches. Over 80% of these I ran through my machines, to try and get this work out of the way as fast as possible. All work units for Windows are now validated and are running the actual decryption work! Note the zero test units left to be sent on this screenshot of the Ravager server 2 days ago:
As of today, we have another batch of test units generated which should be finished very soon. These test batches add Linux and MAC OS support to the decryption effort:
Unfortunately, as I have limited Linux machines and no MAC OS machines at all, I cannot help with these tasks as much as I would like. If you have these machines available, please join the search and help test the work units for these platforms.
To give you some indication of the difficulty in decyphering the current message, I have managed to complete 245523 work units, each containing 2 to the 32nd power Enigma settings. There are about 26 million work units left to be completed!
If your computer decyphers the message, you will receive substantial recognition for your efforts. Please, sign up for BOINC and come help bring this project to a close. If you need additional motivation - there is still a Nazi train full of gold hidden somewhere under the Austrian mountains. Who knows what the remaining messages might tell us?
As a final note, you are able to be paid for your help in decyphering this message in cryptocurrency by joining Team Gridcoin. If you would like to get started, here is a guide on getting set up from scratch. If you are already involved with BOINC and Gridcoin, I would like to invite you to contribute to Enigma@Home. As the biggest Gridcoin miner, I guarantee you that this is currently the best project on which to earn GRC for GPU work. Proof - I am top contributor of all time and top current contributor to Enigma@Home worldwide:
Come and help me bring this project to a close, and stick it to the Nazis one more time!
Content Credit:
Somewhere in that list, I'm contributing a tiny 1GRC a day's worth to the project.
Every little bit counts - that is the entire model behind distributed computing.
Does that seem like an abnormally low amount? I've tried a number of projects and if anything I had worse results. I think I'm covering the power use of only about the first 3 minutes of research each day currently =/
CPU: i7 4790 @ 3.6 ghz
16 GB RAM
AMD Radeon R7 200 series (oldish, I realize)
I started getting blue-screens which I traced to a dust blockage around the CPU fans. I seem to have that resolved and don't have any other reason to suspect the hardware.
Thanks for all your work on the project.
I would expect you to make more than 1GRC/day with that hardware. The GPU won't be able to do much but that CPU is pretty good. Try and point it at a project like YAFU which has relatively low competition.
You also have to remember that your magnitude builds alongside RAC, and thus takes a month or so to reach a point near the peak. A lot of new miners only do BOINC research for one or two days, then give up due to their low mag (you may already know that, I'm not sure...).
Ah, thank you. Yes, it was difficult to tell if my speed was ramping up or not. I'll take another crack at it once I clean up after the hurricane.
Damn, I hope you are doing ok. Are your family and home ok?
We got lucky, though it's probably old news at this point. Storm turned east early and my house was (far) removed from the path of the eye. Lost a back fence but that's about it.
Actually, what GPU do you have exactly? The top end models from that line are still pretty good.
Oddly enough, I can't seem to get the exact model from dxdiag or Control Panel. Been awhile since I installed it. My guess is that it was on the cheaper end of this model line.
That's very strange. What does the display page of dxdiag tell you?
Here's a screen-cap. I'm fairly sure that every other system I've had (most of which, I've built myself) would display the exact model here, and not simply a generic series, but perhaps my memory is off:
I did update my drivers for Gridcoin, so it is possible it was displaying the correct model before. However, I did not think to check.
This is what I am used to as well, rather than an entire series being listed. I had a quick look at the R7 200 series on Wikipedia and it includes models from utterly useless to ones able to compete with the lower end of the current GeForce 10 series. Very strange.
You could just open the case and read the model directly off the card.
Hi @dutch, iam already with you trying to solve the riddle :) 500k RAC from Grcpool-2 are mine :)
Thanks alot for the explanatory post, maybe this motivates a few ppl to point their computational power at Enigma@home .
500k RAC that sounds nice:P
May I ask you which hardware you use?
sure no secrets here :)
Currently i use 2 computers for that, one has a GTX1060 and a GTX1050ti as GPUs the other is running 2 HD7870 GHz Edition. Here is a pic of both the first is the Nvidia one
and the 2nd the AMD one
Cool thank you. Will jump to enigma too with one host :)
Fantastic news! I would love for Team Gridcoin to decipher this message, so the more compute we can throw at it the better.
The other nice thing about this project is that is has a definitive end point - finding the plain text. I like that we can show support to these (relatively) small projects by jumping a lot of hardware over, solving the problem, and then going back to the huge projects like Einstein@Home.
Congrats for reaching 60 :) You are a big boy now!
Aw, shucks. Thanks Trumpman! I see you are almost there yourself!
I might just have to get in on this. :)
Looking forward to having you on board and kicking some Nazi butt. =P
I'd sure like to know if we'll figure out if the Nazi's got to Antartica and into those ice tunnels!
So would I! Only one way to find out.
Wow, super cool, looking forward then!
Seems to be the right time for my new watercooled HD7970 and R7 280X to arrive. Prepare to get hot! :D
Great - more compute for the cause! =)
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