Battle of wits
Dec. 30th, 2012 10:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nekrashevychНедавно закінчив читати "Battle of wits" by Stephen Budiansky про криптографію часів Другої Світової. Дуже цікава історія про те, як уряди зрозуміли, що наука (зокрема математика) їм потрібна. Це сталося не лише у зв'язку із криптографією, але здається таке розуміння відбулося саме під час Другої Світової Війни. Роль криптографії у ДСВ була розсекречена лише недавно (десь у другій половині дев'яностих), і книжка написана за досить свіжими слідами.
Anti-Semitism in America before the Second World War was overt, widespread, and unapologetic. In major cities not only private clubs but major hotels and the more desirable neighborhoods barred Jews. Large corporations basically did not hire Jews, period. Nor did universities... (із пояснення чому євреям було легше попасти на державну службу ніж у приватну корпорацію, чи університет).
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In 1932 the United States had the sixteenth-largest army in the world; it boasted a single mechanized regiment, a cavalry forbidden by Act of Congress to acquire tanks, and a stockpile of equipment left over from wars of earlier decades, even earlier centuries.
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... an officer riding in a tank felt he looked about as dashing as "a construction worker on his way to excavate a basement," as one observer noted [...] British officers were even worse in this regard. American boys at least grew up tinkering with machines. In Britain anything involving grease and gears was for machinists and chauffeurs to deal with, not gentlemen.
(До розвідки і підслуховування радіошифрограм було подібне ставлення.)
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Most of the earmarked recruits [у британську організацію, яка займалася криптографією] were classicists, historians, and scholars of modern languages. [...] Only three of the twenty-one "professor types" were mathematicians; all the rest were historains of art, or professors of medieval German, or lecturers in anciant Greek, or other distinctly nonscientific professions. Partly this simply reflected Denniston's and Adcock's networks of contacts. But partly it reflected the persistent British public-school attitude that properly educated boys studied Latin and Greek; science, even mathematics, were tainted by their association with useful things and thus of "trade."
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...These mental traits are also characteristic of musicians and chess players, which may explain the oft-noted connection between these talents. Music, chess, and mathematics are worlds of absolute bounds, of set rules and order, of logic and structure. Yet the minds that excel within these spheres are precisely the ones capable of looking at a problem in a way that is not at all customary or bounded or logical...
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The comfort that the high [German] command derived from this procedure completely ignored the possibility that anyone could obtain the wheel order, ring setting, and stecker directly, by cryptoanalytic means, from the cipher text itself---a possibility that seemed too fantastic to entertain.
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Після війни: The absurdity of it all was that in refusing to tell the American public the truth of the evidence against Hiss and others, the government was concealing cryptologic secrets that [...] were hardly a secret to the Soviets [...] The McCarthyites sensed the whole story was not being told, which encouraged their belief that monsters were being hidden in the closet, [...]; at the same time it set the American left in its belief, [...] that all of the charges of Communist espionage were inventions of the red baiters. Hiss, White, and Rosenberg became martyrs of the left, whose complete innocence would become an article of faith. In fact, they were guilty as hell...
Anti-Semitism in America before the Second World War was overt, widespread, and unapologetic. In major cities not only private clubs but major hotels and the more desirable neighborhoods barred Jews. Large corporations basically did not hire Jews, period. Nor did universities... (із пояснення чому євреям було легше попасти на державну службу ніж у приватну корпорацію, чи університет).
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In 1932 the United States had the sixteenth-largest army in the world; it boasted a single mechanized regiment, a cavalry forbidden by Act of Congress to acquire tanks, and a stockpile of equipment left over from wars of earlier decades, even earlier centuries.
-------
... an officer riding in a tank felt he looked about as dashing as "a construction worker on his way to excavate a basement," as one observer noted [...] British officers were even worse in this regard. American boys at least grew up tinkering with machines. In Britain anything involving grease and gears was for machinists and chauffeurs to deal with, not gentlemen.
(До розвідки і підслуховування радіошифрограм було подібне ставлення.)
-------
Most of the earmarked recruits [у британську організацію, яка займалася криптографією] were classicists, historians, and scholars of modern languages. [...] Only three of the twenty-one "professor types" were mathematicians; all the rest were historains of art, or professors of medieval German, or lecturers in anciant Greek, or other distinctly nonscientific professions. Partly this simply reflected Denniston's and Adcock's networks of contacts. But partly it reflected the persistent British public-school attitude that properly educated boys studied Latin and Greek; science, even mathematics, were tainted by their association with useful things and thus of "trade."
---------
...These mental traits are also characteristic of musicians and chess players, which may explain the oft-noted connection between these talents. Music, chess, and mathematics are worlds of absolute bounds, of set rules and order, of logic and structure. Yet the minds that excel within these spheres are precisely the ones capable of looking at a problem in a way that is not at all customary or bounded or logical...
-------
The comfort that the high [German] command derived from this procedure completely ignored the possibility that anyone could obtain the wheel order, ring setting, and stecker directly, by cryptoanalytic means, from the cipher text itself---a possibility that seemed too fantastic to entertain.
------
Після війни: The absurdity of it all was that in refusing to tell the American public the truth of the evidence against Hiss and others, the government was concealing cryptologic secrets that [...] were hardly a secret to the Soviets [...] The McCarthyites sensed the whole story was not being told, which encouraged their belief that monsters were being hidden in the closet, [...]; at the same time it set the American left in its belief, [...] that all of the charges of Communist espionage were inventions of the red baiters. Hiss, White, and Rosenberg became martyrs of the left, whose complete innocence would become an article of faith. In fact, they were guilty as hell...
