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You'll enjoy the movie "The Imitation Game" - it's a well-made film about Alan Turing (of Turing-completeness fame) and his working group's cracking of Germany'

You'll enjoy the movie "The Imitation Game" - it's a well-made film about Alan Turing (of Turing-completeness fame) and his working group's cracking of Germany's Enigma encryption system. FWIW, secondary to that: 100%, industry and NIST are actively voicing this, there's an interesting Google blog somewhere about work on it in Chrome (tl;dr: behind flags in chrome, but you can try it today. I think this is what I'm thinking of: https://blog.chromium.org/2023/08/protecting-chrome-traffic-with-hybrid.html https://blog.chromium.org/2023/08/protecting-chrome-traffic-...)

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throw0101d 2y ago
> […] and his working group's cracking of Germany's Enigma encryption system. Enigma was already broken. AIUI, Turing et al helped automate the deciphering messages, which was heavy going manually because of the volumes involved. Bletchley Park did have to do cryptanalysis on Enigma when a new rotor was added though. Completely 'original' breaking did occur at Bletchley Park with (e.g.) the Lorenz cipher; see William "Bill" Tutte.
kadoban 2y ago
It is an enjoyable movie, but I'd caution that it's _quite_ innacurate both about the history in general and about Turing in particular. The book is much better about both.
- kortilla 2y ago
  Is there a tldr on the inaccuracies to quickly inform people who only watched the film?
  - less_less 2y ago
    Geez like pretty much everything. See eg https://slate.com/culture/2014/12/the-imitation-game-fact-vs-fiction-how-true-the-new-movie-is-to-alan-turings-real-life-story.html https://slate.com/culture/2014/12/the-imitation-game-fact-vs... Enigma was originally broken by a team of Polish cryptanalysts, who invented both a paper method to break it (Zygalski sheets) and the machine shown in movie (Rejewski's bomba). Turing later worked on a team to improve the bomba, which was a significant achievement but he didn't invent or spearhead the whole thing. All this "don't use a machine to do a man's job" was bullshit invented for the movie, as were like half the other conflicts. Everyone involved knew that breaking Enigma was important, and they were already using a machine to do it, but after the Nazis changed their use of Enigma, the Brits needed mathematical insights to improve the speed of their machine. The main characters in the film did exist and had some of the personality traits shown, but mostly didn't interact they way that the film showed. Turing was openly gay. Cairncross (the spy) didn't work with Turing. The codebreakers didn't choose which intercepted information to use and how, etc.
    - ranger_danger 2y ago
      > he didn't invent or spearhead the whole thing Many of the bigger inventions in history were popularized by someone other than the original inventor, because everything is a remix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc
    - kadoban 2y ago
      Turing also just comes off like a bit of an antisocial asshole, and those around him are kind of dimwitted fools. Neither of those seem accurate based on anything else I've read of that time. He's a movie trope instead of a character or a person.
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throw0101d 2y ago

> […] and his working group's cracking of Germany's Enigma encryption system. Enigma was already broken. AIUI, Turing et al helped automate the deciphering messages, which was heavy going manually because of the volumes involved. Bletchley Park did have to do cryptanalysis on Enigma when a new rotor was added though. Completely 'original' breaking did occur at Bletchley Park with (e.g.) the Lorenz cipher; see William "Bill" Tutte.

kadoban 2y ago

It is an enjoyable movie, but I'd caution that it's _quite_ innacurate both about the history in general and about Turing in particular. The book is much better about both.

kortilla 2y ago
Is there a tldr on the inaccuracies to quickly inform people who only watched the film?
- less_less 2y ago
  Geez like pretty much everything. See eg https://slate.com/culture/2014/12/the-imitation-game-fact-vs-fiction-how-true-the-new-movie-is-to-alan-turings-real-life-story.html https://slate.com/culture/2014/12/the-imitation-game-fact-vs... Enigma was originally broken by a team of Polish cryptanalysts, who invented both a paper method to break it (Zygalski sheets) and the machine shown in movie (Rejewski's bomba). Turing later worked on a team to improve the bomba, which was a significant achievement but he didn't invent or spearhead the whole thing. All this "don't use a machine to do a man's job" was bullshit invented for the movie, as were like half the other conflicts. Everyone involved knew that breaking Enigma was important, and they were already using a machine to do it, but after the Nazis changed their use of Enigma, the Brits needed mathematical insights to improve the speed of their machine. The main characters in the film did exist and had some of the personality traits shown, but mostly didn't interact they way that the film showed. Turing was openly gay. Cairncross (the spy) didn't work with Turing. The codebreakers didn't choose which intercepted information to use and how, etc.
  - ranger_danger 2y ago
    > he didn't invent or spearhead the whole thing Many of the bigger inventions in history were popularized by someone other than the original inventor, because everything is a remix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc
  - kadoban 2y ago
    Turing also just comes off like a bit of an antisocial asshole, and those around him are kind of dimwitted fools. Neither of those seem accurate based on anything else I've read of that time. He's a movie trope instead of a character or a person.

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