Hi all,

I would appreciate some summary of the current progress on "wrmkx". I know about the existence of ServerStat page, but it just keep of expanding without any explanation. My question is simple: What are we doing and how much is left? I am not a complete beginner, but I am lacking a summary of the work done, of the current progress and what is next. I brief explanation on what are we currently doing (maths or computation-like) would be nice (not only for me).

greeting,
bloodIce

It seems that 33 people who saw the previous post, seems to wonder the same thing. I see that every 10 min approximately another 200 workunits are done. I see also that we have remaining 10786 workunits and about 5000 in the queue. Another 165134 are in progress. Is it only me thinking that if the speed keeps up, we will be done with the current work for about 200 hours (10 days). Well, I will appreciate to know what is next. I see o11, o12, o13 appearing, but my question is until when? Please, it is not wrong to say ... after wrmkx_auto_110-o14324 we might have a clue when we will finish or how to progress further. Not having a clue what are you doing is not right and eventually will hit back. It really puts me off this project (which I like).

/bloodIce

The "Breaking German Army Ciphers" PDF available here http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journal.asp?issn=0161-1194&linktype=offers describes exactly what the server does now.

Basically it splits the text into shorter parts starting at different offsets, assigns a dictionary set (there are currently 8 of them, but only 6 used) and tries all possible machine settings (not including steckerboard).
The process is fully automated, the server stops if it thinks the message was broken, if not it spawns another sub-batch.
Due to the nature of BOINC (parallel processing), lots of blocks are done simultaneously without waiting for the previous batches to come back.
The current message is the first one of the unbroken set from the page above.

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M4 Project homepage
M4 Project wiki

There's an interesting dictionary of German military abbreviations here :

http://archive.org/details/GermanMilitaryAbbreviations

if they're any use, from a dictionary perspective.

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Thank you for the clarification TJM. I was wondering what is the percentage of the search-space that was covered (0.000000000000000001% or less/more) and what do we expect with each new batch from the server. I understand that the goal is until it is cracked, but what is our progress? How many ring combinations we will test. How many we have already tested? If you compare with RSA72 challenge 1% covered for 10 years of activity is a good progress there. That is what I wonder. How much we did, how much is left?

/bloodIce

hello!

Could someone please explain this page http://enigmaathome.net/server_status

Current status

Available workunits:

m4_vroln72_1
# of workunits:	91104000
done 	1708216
remaining 	89395778
in progress 	6
Restarts: target/avg/min	2000/37/33

m4_vroln72_3
# of workunits:	91104000
done 	2863741
remaining 	88239882
in progress 	377
Restarts: target/avg/min	2000/62/59

m4_fnygm76_1
# of workunits:	45552000
done 	1503005
remaining 	43978848
in progress 	70147
Restarts: target/avg/min	1000/32/27

m4_fnygm76_2
# of workunits:	45552000
done 	1504305
remaining 	44023571
in progress 	24124
Restarts: target/avg/min	1000/33/29

1) What does restarts mean ?
2) how many total WUs is remaining to crunch ? Is it an exact number, or it is random search ?

if we crunch 89395778 + 88239882 + 43978848 + 44023571 is this the end, or there are other batches ?

thanks!

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Take a look at this thread http://www.enigmaathome.net/forum_thread.php?id=320


A restart is a single walk through all the M4 machine settings (over 40k work units).

Each walk has a certain chance of breaking the message but until it is broken, no one knows how many walks (statistically, because it's random) are needed. Sometimes it might be a few, but other are tough, especially the short texts.

The numbers in server_status are just upper limits for the server, IMO it would be better to try with another setup instead of reaching 2000 walks.

The number of walks done so far is already high. I hope the texts are not as bad as the last message from original M4 project, which requires over 9k walks and that's at the length of 100 letters.

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M4 Project homepage
M4 Project wiki