A Poor Imitation of Alan Turing
nybooks.com
nybooks.com
It's good entertainment even if it is quite exaggerated and not 100% historically accurate. If it exposes more people to some of the history of computing and one of its great early engineers then I think that is positive.
"“We’ll follow the pattern laid out with ‘The King’s Speech,’ ‘The Artist’ and pictures like that and move slowly and deliberately,” said Erik Lomis, distribution chief for the Weinstein Company.
[Just 4 theaters to begin with.]
"The slow but steady expansion will see “The Imitation Game” add six markets and between 25 and 30 theaters on Dec. 12. It will go nationwide in between 600 and 800 theaters on Christmas Day.”
(http://variety.com/2014/film/news/imitation-game-box-office-...)
Despite everything in the article about the inaccuracies (and they are right), I found the movie to be enjoyable and really pretty close to the real story if you consider this is all told in under two hours.
Very cute theater with all sorts of obscure foreign films, art films, etc.
http://www.landmarktheatres.com/san-francisco/embarcadero-ce...
The real "wide" release for this movie is Christmas Day (Dec 25th). It shouldn't be hard to find a showing after that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8735944
When I saw it in NYC, it was only at the Angelika.
The real secret of US and British cryptanalytic efforts was to approach it as an industrial problem. That was new. Cryptanalysis until WWII was someone at a desk with pencil and paper. Cryptanalytic units were tens of people. The WWII effort on the Allied side involved not only Bletchly Park, but a big operation at Arlington Hall in the US and another operation in Hawaii. Bombes, the electromechanical key-testers, were built by the British Tabulating Machine Company, National Cash Register, and Western Electric. (NCR's was the most useful and was produced in large quantities.) About 60,000 people were involved at peak. It wasn't clear until long after WWII how big the operation was. Few people were allowed to see more than a small part of it. This wasn't a "one lone genius" thing.
Some of the secrecy was to make Churchill look good. There were times during WWII when Churchill sent a message to a general facing heavy opposition "Press on and you will be victorious", and took historical credit for his courage and decisiveness. Decades later we find out that Churchill had info such as "14th Panzer low on fuel and ammo, cannot fight for more than 2 hours" from intercepts. All German units sent in a strength return each day (all serious armies do this) which reads like "#1, 12000, #2, 450 ..." and is simply many effective soldiers, how much ammo, and other basic numbers. It's dull, boring, and tells which units can fight effectively and how far they can move. Much of Bletchley Park's work was decrypting and tabulating that info, which told Allied commanders where the weak spots were on the German side.
I haven't seen that, but my understanding is that they cast him as straight. If so, how is it possible to get past that (rather insulting) inaccuracy?
All German units sent in a strength return each day (all serious armies do this) which reads like "#1, 12000, #2, 450 ..." and is simply many effective soldiers, how much ammo, and other basic numbers. It's dull, boring, and tells which units can fight effectively and how far they can move. Much of Bletchley Park's work was decrypting and tabulating that info, which told Allied commanders where the weak spots were on the German side.
Can't believe that there wasn't a glut of bogus strength reports floating around. ("No, Mr. Turing, your friends will find that the 14th Panzer is fully armed and operational.")
It was an interesting sort of psychosis.
Surely the secrecy was critical to the ongoing success (if the Germans suspected they could improve their opsec if not completely change their systems)? Given that how do you instruct the general while leaking the absolute minimum about your knowledge?
Now a side effect may have been to make Churchill look good but for the duration of the war confidence in leadership would have been a generally good thing. I don't know how much Churchill played up his abilities after the war but to be honest it doesn't really worry me.
I think you could really take any one of those stories and make them entertaining.
Another good movie on the topic of computers is 'The traveling salesman' and 'Sneakers'.
I'm having trouble finding the sources now, but I could've sworn I remembered reading that no-warning, no-note suicide is not at all uncommon. And it's especially true with men, I thought.
> The fabrications were especially frustrating to me, because we know it’s possible to bring Alan Turing’s story to life in a way that fully honors the true science and history. We know that, because Hugh Whitemore’s 1986 play Breaking the Code did it. The producers of The Imitation Game would’ve done better just to junk their script, and remake Breaking the Code into a Hollywood blockbuster. (Note that there is a 1996 BBC adaptation of Breaking the Code, with Derek Jacobi as Turing.)
Except that this is simply patently untrue in this case. The allegation here is precisely that the film makers were too lazy to fully exploit what real life gave them, and instead resorted to Hollywood stock.
And the director didn’t just “rearrange a few things”, he completely mis-represents, at the same time, Turing’s (as well as others’) character, the nature of his work, and the historical progression. After that there’s not much left.
>These errors are not random; there is a method to the muddle. The filmmakers see their hero above all as a martyr of a homophobic Establishment, and they are determined to lay emphasis on his victimhood.