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To: stripes1776
As for any other ciphers, they would have been of a lower priority.
That's far too broad a generalization. A great deal of good intelligence was extracted from the simpler codes.
Even then the possible permutations would have been in the millions. I seems unlikely that he could have been of help in cracking these other ciphers
That's a remark that could be made only by someone who has no actual experience in cracking ciphers.
A man can't be brilliant in all fields of learning. Tolkien was most brilliant when it came to writing mythology.

Tolkien was a philologist - a student of languages. And he was brilliant in his field. He was fluent in English, French, German, Greek, Welsh, Finnish, Spanish, and Italian, and had a working knowledge of Serbian, Russian, Swedish, Danish, and Dutch.

Remember, the intercepted messages weren't convenently translated into English before encryption, and there were very few people in England who were familiar with as many of the languages involved.

I won't say that Tolkien had the trick of mind that made for a successful cryptanalyst in pre-machine and computer ciphers. His lifelong penchant for playing around with languages suggests that he did, but there's no way of knowing for sure.

But his lack of mathematical skills only precluded him from certain tasks in developing the breaks for machine ciphers. There were thousands working at Bletchley, and only a handful involved the mathematical analysis that resulted in the breaks in Enigma and Lorenz.

Tolkien clearly had skills that could have been put to use.

23 posted on 09/20/2009 8:55:22 AM PDT by jdege
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To: jdege
Tolkien was a philologist - a student of languages. And he was brilliant in his field. He was fluent in English, French, German, Greek, Welsh, Finnish, Spanish, and Italian, and had a working knowledge of Serbian, Russian, Swedish, Danish, and Dutch.

Not to mention the ancient tongues, primitive English and many other dialects. He was a very impressive man.

24 posted on 09/20/2009 8:57:13 AM PDT by paulycy (Screw the RACErs.)
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To: jdege
Remember, the intercepted messages weren't convenently translated into English before encryption, and there were very few people in England who were familiar with as many of the languages involved.

Those are the skills of a translator, not a code-breaker. That is a completely different kettle of fish. Language translation has nothing to do with cryptology.

That's a remark that could be made only by someone who has no actual experience in cracking ciphers.

Then please name one of these other ciphers, and then we can do the research and see how many possible permutations there were. The code book I have said there would have been 159,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible permutations for the cryptanalyst to check in order to crack a message encrypted with the Enigama machine. That is, before Turing set set mind to work and found a simpler way.

26 posted on 09/20/2009 1:08:32 PM PDT by stripes1776 ("That if gold rust, what shall iron do?" --Chaucer)
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