Also this movie from 1992 was in the previous math in movie collection. Here
again a cut. First the cryptology lecture, then the scrabble scene demonstrating
afterwards the code breaking. At the time, when that movie came out,
I was still in Switzerland and had to serve also yearly in the Swiss army. I was
in the crypto group and we had learned and implemented factorization algorithms,
some others did number field stuff, LLL lattice methods or
elliptic curves. I had at that time been programming together with
Beat Scherer a student
of Ernst Specker and Hans Läuchli. Among other things, we completely implemented from
scratch some integer factorization algorithms like Morrison-Brillard).
Cryptology is a fascinating topic. Unfortunately, we
could not take home our code (we programmed in Pascal using an
in-house developed large integer library) and even before going home,
had to burn notes. Imagine what would have happened if a soldier
would have found the Artin map
trick in the number field method which is mentioned in that Sneakers movie ...
As the second clip shows, the world would not be the same.