The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

over the previous twenty-five years, encountering tens of thousands of messages, Elizebeth had solved so many different kinds of puzzles that she knew how to find shortcuts, to identify patterns in fields of text that were like signatures telling her what to do next. She was a kind of human computer in this sense. Today, if you want a computer to recognize certain patterns, you can train it through a process of “machine learning.” How do you get a computer to recognize a picture of a cloud, for instance? You feed it a lot of pictures and say, essentially, This here is a cloud, and This here is not a cloud. After the computer gains enough “training data,” it’s able to look at a new image, do some math, and say, This is almost certainly a cloud. By 1940, Elizebeth’s brain had probably accumulated more training data about codes and ciphers than any other brain on the planet. She had just seen so many damn clouds.