This was explained in the article right there:
reply> it suspected that the plaintext of Nr. 173, SIPVX, might be related to the plaintext of the unbroken MVUEH message
It makes sense that Nr. 172 and Nr. 173 might be related since they were sent at around the same time.
In Nr. 173, "ROSENOW ROSENOW" was also present.
It also makes sense that a longer crib would generally be more effective than a shorter one.
It was partially explained by the article. It was not stated that ROSENOW was repeated in 173, and it was not obvious from the article text why ROSENOW would ever be repeated. Thus my curiosity.
replyA sibling commenter explained it - Rosenow is both a municipal name and a district name, so naturally it would be repeated. (Like "New York, New York")
It also makes sense that a longer crib
would generally be more effective than a
shorter one.
I'm a novice at crypto though, so, maybe I've got that totally wrong.
The reason a crib is useful is because the enigma can't route a letter back to itself. So, you can slide the crib along the message until no letters line up, and that's possibly where it is. If your crib is "the", that's not terribly useful, because it could exist anywhere. The longer the better.
replyI ONLY know this because https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsBZOcqZerk, btw.
Rosenow is a municipal (around 32km²) and in there is a district also called Rosenow. So the sender just specified his current position a bit more.
replyakin to "New York, New York" (as in NYC, NY)
replyAh, thank you! That makes sense.
replydeleted
replyMaybe naive of me, but could it simply just be the overfitting of the same tokens being sent on the input twice because of repetition rather than some unknown implied intelligence.
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