On www.enigmaco.de there is an interactive simulator of the German Enigma machine that was used during World War II to encode messages sent to the u-boot fleet. The story of how the British found an inegenious way of decoding these messages at Bletchley park, and through a paintstaking process based on human calculation (the original, mostly femal, calculators), is one of triumph of intelligence. The effort was a concrete aid to the allied effort, and shortened the war.
Cryptography is a fascinating subject, of cunning intelligence, and a great cultural analogy to what the spontaneous, but often as difficult encoding of natural laws is.
One of the best books of fiction about the subject is Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon.
Thanks for the link!
And yep, WW II was arguibly won by Russia+Turing (some people estimate that he shortened the war by two years).
The Cryptonomicon rocks.