Cryptology 密码破译

By Paul Millard 保罗.米勒德著

Secret codes are not a new idea. They are almost as old as writing itself. We know that the Ancient Egyptians and Greeks used them, as did the Arabs of a thousand years ago. They were especially important in war. Commanders didn’t want the enemy to capture their messages and understand their plans, so they wrote them in code. Of course, the enemy did want to understand the messages, so they would try to find the code, or ‘break’ it.

密码并不是一个新的想法。密码几乎是跟书写本身一样的老东西了。我们知道，古埃及和古希腊人早就会使用密码了，一千多年前的阿拉伯人也会使用密码。密码在战争的时候特别重要。指挥官并不希望敌人捕捉到他们的信息从而了解到他们的计划，所以他们用密码写信息。当然，敌人肯定是想要试图了解信息，所以他们会试图找到密码，或者“破译”密码。

The Enigma code
As a result, codes became more and more complicated. One of the most famous is the Enigma code, invented by the Germans and used in the Second World War. People believed that it was impossible to break, because it was so clever. The amazing thing about Enigma was that it was always changing. In one message, the letter ‘e’ could be ‘f’, but in another message it could be ‘z’. So, there were millions of possibilities in every coded message.

Enigma密码
因此，密码变得原来越复杂。最著名的就是德国人在二战中发明使用的Enigma密码。人们相信那是无法破译的，因为Enigma密码非常聪明。Enigma最了不起的就是它总在改变。在一个信息里，字母“e”可能是“f”，但在另一个信息里可能就是“z”了。所以每一个加密的信息，都有成千上万种可能。

The first people to attempt to break the code were the Polish, who were concerned about Hitler’s rise to power. A group of mathematicians worked on the Enigma problem. They found out a lot about how it worked, but they couldn’t understand it. When Hitler attacked in 1939, the Poles told the British everything that they knew about the code.
第一个尝试破解Enigma的人是关注希特勒当权的波兰人。一群数学家研究Enigma问题。他们发现了Enigma如何运作，但是他们并不理解。1939年，当希特勒发动袭击，波兰人将他们对密码所知的一切都告诉了英国人。

Atlantic danger
Most of the British code-breakers thought that Enigma was unbreakable. They were especially concerned about the Enigma variations used by the German navy. The submarines sent by Hitler to attack ships in the Atlantic were probably the greatest danger faced by the British and American allies in the war. Britain needed food and other essentials from outside, and the Americans needed to send soldiers and supplies safely across the ocean. Without breaking the code, there was little chance of defeating the submarines. Without control of the Atlantic, there was little chance of victory.

大西洋威胁
大多数英国的密码破译者认为Enigma是无法破译的。他们特别关心德国海军所使用的Enigma的变化。希特勒派去攻击大西洋船只的潜艇，可能就是英美同盟战中所面临的最大的威胁。英国需要从外界获得食物和生活必需品，而美国需要把士兵和日用品安全地越过大西洋送到战地。不破译密码，那几乎是没有机会击溃潜艇的。如果未能控制大西洋，那几乎是没有可能取得胜利的。

Alan Turing, code-breaker
Almost alone, one man began to work on the problem. He was a brilliant young mathematician called Alan Turing. He believed that he could break the code with advanced logic and statistics. However, he needed to make a machine that could do a very large number of calculations very quickly. By improving on the machines that the Poles had made, he built a machine called the ‘Bombe’.

阿兰 图灵，密码破译者
有一个人，几乎是他单独一个人，开始了对Enigma这个问题的研究。他是一个名叫阿兰.图灵的杰出的年轻数学家。他相信，他能够用先进的逻辑学和统计学破译密码。然而，他需要制造一台能快速计算大量数字的机器。通过对波兰人所造机器的改良，阿兰图灵制造了一台叫“图灵机”。

It worked. He broke the Enigma code. The British and Americans could read the messages that were sent to and from Hitler’s submarines. Slowly, the allies won the Battle of the Atlantic. They had freedom to move at sea and could send their armies to liberate Western Europe from Hitler and the Nazis. In 1943, they went to Italy and in 1944 they successfully landed in France. This was the landing shown in the film, ‘Saving Private Ryan’. Without Turing and his code-breaking, the history of Europe and the world could have been very different.

“图灵机”真的产生了效果。阿兰.图灵破译了Enigma密码。英国人和美国人能够读懂希特勒潜艇收发的信息。慢慢的，盟军赢得了大西洋战争。他们能够在海上自由移动，并能够把他们的军队派去西欧，从希特勒和纳粹党那里解放西欧。1943年，他们去了意大利，1944年，他们在法国成功登陆。这就是电影《拯救大兵瑞恩》中出现的登陆画面。没有图灵和他的密码破译，欧洲的历史和这个世界将会很不一样。

From code-breaking to computer-building
Turing continued working with machines and electronics and in 1944 he talked about ‘building a brain’. Turing had an idea for an electronic ‘universal machine’ that could do any logical task. Soon after the war, he went to work at Manchester University and in 1948 the ‘Manchester Baby’ was born. It was Turing’s second great invention and the world’s first digital computer. When he sent a message from his computer to a telex machine, Alan Turing wrote the first e-mail in history.

从密码破译到电脑的构造
图灵继续研究机器和电子，1944年，他谈及到“构建一个大脑”。 图灵有一个想法，是关于能做任何逻辑工作的电子“通用机器”。二战不久后，他去了曼彻斯特大学工作，1948年“曼彻斯特宝贝”诞生了。这是图灵的第二个伟大的发明，也是世界上第一个数码电脑。当他用他的电脑成功把一个信息发到一台电报机时候，阿兰图灵写了历史上的第一份电子邮件。

So, what happened next in the life of this highly talented man? His great achievements in code-breaking and computing happened in his twenties and thirties. He was still a young man - in the same year that his computer worked for the first time, he nearly ran in the Olympic Games for Britain. We know that he had many ideas to develop in digital computing, quantum physics, biology and philosophy. Sadly, he wasn’t able to work fully on these ideas. Turing’s personal life became more and more problematic.
那么，这个有高度天赋的人在接下来的生活里发生了什么事？他在二三十岁的时候，取得了密码破译和计算机上的伟大成就。他仍是一个年轻人——在他的电脑开始工作的同一年，他差点跑进了英国的奥林匹克运动会。我们知道，他有许多想法来发展数码电脑，量子物理，生物和哲学。不幸的是，他未能在这些想法上进行研究。图灵的私人生活变得越来越有问题了。

A genius under attack
Alan Turing was a homosexual. Nowadays, this is legal and widely accepted in Britain and most other Western countries. Fifty years ago, it was a very different story, and people were sent to prison for homosexual acts. Turing had to stop doing code-breaking work for the British government because his homosexuality was a ‘security risk’. This hurt and angered him, especially as it hadn’t been a problem in the war years. Increasingly, Turing refused to hide his homosexuality, believing that there was nothing wrong with him. Perhaps he felt that he deserved individual freedom, having done so much for freedom in the world.

被攻击的天才
阿兰图灵是一个同性恋。现在，在英国和大多数的其他西方国家，同性恋是合法并且被广泛接受的。50年前，同性恋却是一个很不一样的事，人们会因为有同性恋行为而被送入监狱。图灵不得不停止为英国政府做密码破译工作，因为作为同性恋，他是一个“危险分子”。 这伤害并激怒了他，特别是因为在战时，同性恋并不是一个问题。渐渐地，图灵拒绝隐藏他的同性恋，并相信他自己并没有什么问题。也许他觉得为全球的自由付出了这么多，他自己也该获得个人的自由了。

Finally, he was arrested by the police and in March 1952 he was found guilty at a criminal trial. He wasn’t sent to prison – instead he was injected with the female hormone, oestrogen, in an attempt to stop his homosexual behaviour.

最终，他被警察逮捕，并在1952年3月被刑事法庭判定有罪。不过，他并没有被送进监狱，而是被注射了雌激素，来阻止他的同性恋行为。

A tragic end
Two years later, Alan Turing was dead. He killed himself by eating an apple containing the poison, cyanide. The apple - the symbol of the physics of Newton, of forbidden love, of knowledge itself - became the symbol of tragic death.

悲惨的结局
两年后，阿兰图灵死了。他吃了一个含有氰化物毒素的苹果而自杀。苹果——牛顿物理学的标志，禁恋的标志，知识的标志——成为了悲剧死亡的标志。

For many years, Turing was a forgotten hero. Now, more than fifty years after his death, more and more people are learning of his work in war and in peace. The BBC made a television programme about him. Some years ago, a statue designed by Glyn Hughes was put up in a small park in Manchester. It is of Turing, sitting on a park bench, with an apple in his hand. The money for the statue mostly came from individual people who wanted to remember him. No money came from the British government or any major computer company, despite the great work that Turing had done for them.
很多年来，阿兰图灵是一个被遗忘的英雄。现在，在他死后的50多年后，越来越多的人听说了他在战争年代及和平年代的故事。英国广播电台做了关于他的一个电视节目。几年后，格林休设计的一座塑像在曼彻斯特的一座小公园里矗立起来。雕像是图灵手握一个苹果，坐在公园的石凳上。建造塑像的资金大多数来源于想要铭记阿兰图灵的个人。虽然，图灵为英国政府和电脑做了大量的工作，但是英国政府或任何大型电脑公司并未给塑像的建造提供资金。

It is a wonderful memorial, but perhaps a greater memorial is that you are reading this now because of Turing’s computing work, and that I could write it in a democratic country in Western Europe.
这是一个很棒的纪念碑，但是，更伟大的纪念碑，也许正是有了图灵在电脑上的研究工作，你才能在电脑上读到这些故事，而且我也能在西欧的一个民主的国家里写关于阿兰图灵破译密码的故事。