the Imitation Game - breaking the code ? ch4 + 1

A very disappointing film imo. A travesty of a great story. Two points in particular: first, the need to keep the source secret from the Nazis was true but of course it would not have been Turing's decision; second and more fundamentally stupid was the eureka moment in the pub when he works out how he can rescue the bombe machines by providing cribs -- but that was what he'd designed and built them to do in the first place. It would be like Henry Ford saying they could use a car's steering wheel to make it go round corners.

isn't it the first thing they do to decrypt messages...
look for the letter 'e' etc. most common letter?

thought his acting was appalling. really bad caricature of a person?
any real footage of Turing to see this mythical mincer? really bad
acting.

Derek Jacobi did a far better job.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GH1WYUKP3hk
horizon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S23yie-779k

derek jacobi

isn't it the first thing they do to decrypt messages...
look for the letter 'e' etc. most common letter?

Yes and no. Normally they would but in fact Enigma machines were not vulnerable to letter-frequency analysis because the Enigma machines change the letter 'e' (say) to a different letter each time. That is its great strength, but in it also lay its great weakness: a letter would never be changed to itself: so 'e' could become any other letter except 'e'. This means you can immediately be sure that XERPJ cannot mean HELLO.

Now, how letters were changed was dependent on the initial settings of rotors and plugboards. These were changed daily or even at the start of every message. Bletchley Park's job was to work out these initial settings, after which it was straightforward to decrypt the messages (which of course would be in German so ...).

So the Bletchley Park mob would use "cribs" which were known phrases that were likely to be used (eg Heil Hitler, or Weather Report) to look for clashes (where a letter seems to be encoded as itself) [missing step here] and rule those rotor settings and move onto the next ones. Turing's bombe machines meant it could take around 20 minutes to run through billions of combinations and then read German messages for the rest of the day (in theory -- in practice, you'd still need to decrypt messages, translate them from German to English, then work out the military significance of an order for ten thousand tubs of cole slaw).

so basically the film is idiotic.

sherlock as Turing?

I liked the Derek Jacobi version, I did not watch The Imitation Game.

I felt Alan Turing was unfairly pursued for his homosexuality, he did not advertise it, unless there were other security reasons for this.

It was an extremely ungrateful way for this country to treat him.


There are some people who worked on WWII code breaking who got no recognition at all. Because their work had to be kept secret

as we turned code breaking to a new enemy the Soviet Union.

The Poles started trying to break Enigma before WWII, they handed what they had done over to us.

I don't think the Germans believed it was possible to break Enigma, but we did it. It helped us win the war.

Yes, the film is idiotic but could easily have been rescued simply by moving some scenes and dialogue around, which might easily have happened if the writer or director had thought to get the script checked before shooting started. That's the frustrating part.

And yes, Turing probably was a bit weird but he was also a genius, and it is the latter that is more important.

There was a documentary series which included the famous statistician Jack Good who was asked if they knew Turing was gay. He replied along the lines that some people suspected but luckily the security people never found out, "or they'd have sacked him and we might have lost the war".

Btw, a good read on a different but related them is Blackett's War, about boffins in the Battle of the Atlantic. I've just come across this 10-minute clip of the author talking about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4yMMTXaiCs

They pursued Turing for his homosexuality after the war.

Both the U.K. and U.S.A. treated Turing disgracefully.

I haven't seen the film but a friend of mine who has more than a passing interest in cryptography was disgusted by it. As well as the points flagged by Ramruma he said the film gave the impression that just a handful of people worked at Bletchley Park when we know there were thousands.

All valid criticism if this was a documentary but it's a film, for entertainment not education, so does it work on that level?

Do you watch ,umm, 'specialist' films and go 'That's rubbish that! A plumber would never work naked and would ensure the randy housewife stood well back from him whilst he went about his work'.

RV Jones was the scientist who took many of the chess-like decisions whether and how to react to intelligence gathered from the Germans. He wrote an excellent book about it called Most Secret War, which was also the title of a 1977 documentary series narrated by William Woollard which is all available Youtube:
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uf5caj9ZhpQ&list=PLBYclEE4V19AiC_aSv3vbc6v0ms9o5qLV