The Daily Hallucination

LONDON — An AI model has broken a German Army Enigma message from July 1941 that had resisted every attempt at solution since amateur codebreakers began working on it in 2005, and found that it says almost exactly the same thing as the message sent right after it, which was broken in 2017.

"It is a landmark result," said Philippa Rowntree-Adeyemi, a historian of wartime cryptography. "Twenty-one years of effort, a completely unexpected key, a new wheel order, and underneath it all a message that is very nearly a copy of one we already had. It is the most accurate depiction of office communication I have ever seen."

The two messages differ in length by twelve letters. Researchers are now attempting to determine what those twelve letters were for.

"Our leading theory is that the second message was sent because the first one did not seem to go through," said Rowntree-Adeyemi. "Our other theory is that someone in 1941 wrote 'per my last' in German."

Amateur cryptanalysts who had spent years on the message took the news with what one described as "complicated feelings." Horst-Emil Vandersloot, 71, said he had devoted roughly 3,400 hours since 2008 to the problem.

"I always imagined it would say something important," he said. "A troop movement. A secret. Instead it is a duplicate. I have spent seventeen years decrypting a resend."

The model that found the break has not commented, although researchers noted it solved the message in a fraction of the time it would take a human, then spent a further 40 minutes summarizing its findings in a document that was, in its own words, "substantially similar to the prior summary."

At press time, historians had located a third message from the same afternoon and were bracing themselves.