61 years after Henry Reed was released from military service as a translator at Bletchley Park, the codebreaking continues.

The M4 Project is attempting to break undeciphered Enigma messages from World War II, using open-source, distributed computing. Like the SETI@home project, M4 uses software installed on participants' computers to cycle through seemingly infinite (2x10¹⁴⁵) plaintext translations of the enciphered message. Using a "hill-climbing" algorithm to continually narrow the number of possible correct solutions, they have already succeeded in breaking their first message:

Radio signal 1851/19/252: F T 1132/19 contents: Forced to submerge during attack. Depth charges. Last enemy position 0830h AJ 9863, (course]) 220 degrees, (speed) 8 knots. (I am) following (the enemy). (Barometer) falls 14 mb, (wind) nor-nor-east, (force) 4, visibility 10 (nautical miles).

The three unbroken messages were originally presented as a challenge by Ralph Erskin, in a 1995 letter to the editor of the journal Cryptologia. The signals were intercepts from the North Atlantic in 1942, and are presumed to have been enciphered using Germany's M4 (4 rotor) Naval Enigma.

You can join the fight to defeat the Axis powers by downloading the M4 Project's Enigma Suite.