破解密碼時,人工智能在“思考”什麼
A few weeks ago I went to the Imperial War museum in London to watch an artificial intelligence program attempt to crack the mindbendingly complex Enigma code used by the Germans during the second world war. It did so in 12 minutes and 50 seconds.
數週前，我去了倫敦的帝國戰爭博物館(Imperial War Museum)，觀摩一個人工智能程序試圖破解德國人在二戰期間使用的複雜的英格瑪(Enigma)密碼。它用了12分50秒就破解了那套密碼。Having already machine read some German language training data from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the AI program crunched through billions of permutations generated by the four-rotor Enigma machine sifting combinations of letters for their “Germanness”.
在機器閱讀了來自《格林童話》(Grimm’s Fairy Tales)的一些德文培訓數據後，人工智能程序分析了由四個轉子的英格瑪機器生成的數十億個排列組合，在海量字母組合中尋找德文語句。
A challenge that had occupied some of Britain’s most brilliant mathematical minds at Bletchley Park for many months and at enormous cost was solved by a modern AI program in a few minutes for only ￡10. The program, developed by the data analytics company Enigma Pattern and boosted by 2,000 virtual servers, was able to check an astonishing 41m combinations a second.
曾經讓布萊切利公園(Bletchley Park)一些英國最優秀數學家冥思苦想好幾個月的挑戰，如今在幾分鐘內就被現代人工智能程序解決了，而且成本只有10英鎊。由數據分析公司Enigma Pattern開發的這個程序，由2000個虛擬服務器提供支持，每秒能夠篩查驚人的4100萬個排列組合。
