Alan Turing's declassified papers

@ulaulaman via @MathisintheAir about #AlanTuring on #arXiv

Recently Ian Taylor has uploaded on arXiv a couple of declassified papers by Alan Turing about statistics, probability and cryptography:

---

1. The Statistics of Repetitions

In order to be able to obtain reliable estimates of the value of given repeats we need to have information about repetition in plain language. Suppose for example that we have placed two messages together and that we find repetitions consisting of a tetragramme, two bigrammes, and fifteen single letters, and that the total overlap was 105, i.e. that the maximum possible number of repetitions which could be obtained by altering letters of the messages is 105; suppose also that the lengths of the messages are 200 and 250; in such a case what is the probability of the fit being right, no other information about the day's traffic being taken into consideration, but information about the character of the enciphered text being available in considerable quantity?

2. The Applications of Probability to Cryptography

The theory of probability may be used in cryptography with most effect when the type of cipher used is already fully understood, and it only remains to find the actual keys. It is of rather less value when one is trying to diagnose the type of cipher, but if definite rival theories about the type of cipher are suggested it may be used to decide between them.