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Don’t Overlook the Obvious

Sometimes the answer to your problem has been there all along — you just have to look in the right places.

The circle and star might seem obvious, but maybe not. If you have red-green color blindness, you probably won’t see the red star, and the card might even look exactly like the bottom one.

After many frustrating months, Alan Turing’s decryption machine, Bombe, still wasn’t able to break the German codes generated by their machine, Enigma. Then Turing realized there were “cribs,” or common phrases that occurred frequently in daily messages, such as statements from weather operators (“the weather for tonight”) and the ubiquitous sign-off, “Heil Hitler.” By searching for combinations that produced these common (obvious) phrases, Bombe could then use them to crack the code.