Eighty years ago, less than two months before the invasion of Poland which would trigger World War 2, a short conference of cryptanalysts began in Paris. At the meeting, representatives of the Deuxième Bureau and the British intelligence services were presented by Polish Intelligence with clones of the Enigma enciphering machine currently used by the German military and techniques for decrypting the messages it produced. These were the fruits of ten years work by the Ciphers Office of the Polish army's general staff and the brilliant mathematicians they had recruited. The Polish contribution to the Enigma decryption - including the invention of the "bomba kryptologiczna" (cryptologic bomb) - is detailed here.
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