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Published on: E

February 1, 1942

The Germans added a fourth wheel to the Enigma machines used to encrypt messages. This would pose a problem only initially, later solved by Alan Turing’s team. However, the fourth wheel multiplied the number of combinations by 26 and made Bayesian probabilistic techniques impossible. The combinations, including the starting positions, were approximately 150 million million million times 17,576 starting positions times 26 = 2E24.