7 ms·

“The Imitation Game” and Alan Turing’s Real Contribution to Computing

61 points by johndcook 12y ago

jgrahamc 12y ago
This is true, but there are so many other things horribly wrong with that film that it hardly seems worth mentioning that they screwed up the description of the Turing Machine's capabilities.
- tokenadult 12y ago
  What other things do you find wrong with that film? Do you think that the film detracts from the story of Turing's life, overall, or are the things wrong just Hollywood repackaging of a story that is still told in a meaningful way in the film? I'd like to support a movie that represents Turing's life fairly, but the film hasn't opened here yet, so I haven't had a chance to see it.
  - jgrahamc 12y ago
    1. Turing did not write by himself to Churchill and get himself put in charge. He wrote with others and asked for more resources. 2. Pretty much all sequences with the Bombe are a cringe because they appear to be building a machine but not know what it is for. It's implied that it's a Turing Machine. 3. They apparently hadn't thought of using a crib resulting in a dramatic run back to Bletchley from the pub sequence to get the Bombe working. 4. John Cairncross didn't work in Turing's group. So the whole plot with Cairncross and Turing and blackmail is nonsense. 5. Gordon Welchman doesn't appear in the film and Hugh Alexander is instead credited with coming up with the Bombe diagonal board. 6. Turing is shown building a computer in his home in the early 1950s. Not likely. 7. Turing never told a Manchester police officer his entire life story revealing all of Bletchley's secrets. Also, he didn't try to stop the police investigation. He's the one that reported the burglary. 8. Joan Clarke wasn't recruited through a crossword competition, she was already known to be a bright mathematician. I could go on. Of course, none of this had to happen. I met the director and offered (for free) to help them get stuff right.
    - JshWright 12y ago
      > Joan Clarke wasn't recruited through a crossword competition, she was already known to be a bright mathematician. Yes, but without Gordon Welchman (the person who brought her on board), they needed some other story to explain how she was involved.
      - jgrahamc 12y ago
        Right. But why was Welchman missing? Didn't make any sense to me. The whole thing felt like someone read Hodges' book, put it down and wrote a fanfic version.
    - DennisP 12y ago
      I'm not claiming Turing actually built that computer, but I think he could have if he wanted to. Atanasoff and his grad student built a computer in 1939 with $650 in funding (equivalent to $8K today). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Vincent_Atanasoff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Vincent_Atanasoff
      - vezzy-fnord 12y ago
        And then Konrad Zuse's Z1 before that, which was electromechanical but actually programmable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_%28computer%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_%28computer%29 Sadly destroyed during WWII along with the original Z2 and Z3 machines.
    - chriswarbo 12y ago
      This is why we can't have nice things. These kinds of criticisms seem little more than trying to jump on an SEO bandwagon. It's important that the true accomplishments, history and acknowledgements are understood by the writers and others working on a production like this, but it does not matter so much that the film portrays exactly these. Just like SciFi writers should understand what is and is not possible, but are free to relax those limits in their stories. Firstly, it is not a documentary, it is a work of fiction which is "based on a true story". Secondly, we're not watching presenters telling us what's going on; we're watching actors playing characters. With that in mind, when I watched the film I not only enjoyed it immensely, but I also found it completely clear that the writers had their facts straight. I didn't once cringe at the presentation, which I often do when non-experts describe something technical which I understand. As for your individual points: 1) The intention of having Turing write to Churchill was to establish the (partially subconscious) arrogance of the Turing character, and his logical approach to solving problems. Mentioning Churchill's involvement at all gives the audience a clue to the importance of the work, which might otherwise be seen as conscription-dodging. This was more important for the film than making a realistic portrayal of the process of resource aquisition in wartime Britain. 2) There was definitely the feeling that nobody understood Turing's exact approach when he was designing the Bombe, but during the construction phase the only sense of confusion I got was whether their time was better spent on Turing's unproven machine or on their known, but inefficient manual approaches. The character of Joan guesses at one point that Turing is trying to build a Universal Turing Machine. There is no mention whether the Bombe itself is or is not such a machine, but as the film progresses, we see post-war Turing working on another machine which is most likely universal (presumably the Manchester Mark 1 or one of its successors). The Bombe was clearly a stepping-stone to get to this later machine, just as Turing hints that this machine is just a stepping-stone to some later, "smarter" machine. There is a strong implication that Turing's character doesn't regard these machines as distinct devices, but as the continual "upgrade" of the same core concept. That his first iteration wasn't universal doesn't matter. 3) Artistic license. The audience mustn't be bombarded by too many encryption concepts early on, but the story much march ahead, so why not use each one as a plot device? 4) It makes the film more interesting though. Again, it's not a documentary. It does give a sense of the paranoia of the period, and the double/triple/quadruple bluffs work very well to portray the intelligence of the characters, especially that Turing can't just think his way out of his problems (which is important, given how much Turing's intelligence had been put across earlier). This changes the character of the film from superhero Turing saving the day with his super brain, to a dangerous and intricate game between very capable people. 5) The fact it was mentioned at all shows that the history was known. The theatrical intension is clear: Turing's character needed the help of his team, even if he would not admit it. This minor plot point could be established without bringing in a new character for the audience to keep track of, so the attribution was shifted on to an existing character. Again, not a documentary. 6) That scene works well in his home, and benefits from the presence of the machine. It would be awkward to interrupt the conversation while they pop down the road to the University where it would have been in reality. 7) How else could it be told to the audience? Should Turing have been talking to himself while out on a run? The police interrogation provides a context for telling the story in the first place, as well as an impending darkness that it's not all going to end well (else he wouldn't be getting investigated). Having a bunch of eminent historians and scientists doing talking-head sequences interspersed with CGI infographics only works for documentaries. 8) The crosswords are a useful plot point, can be related to by the audience (using competitions to recruit secret spies would be especially effective at inspiring children) and are a nice little piece of trivia. The fact that they weren't very useful kind of ruins it though; hence they invented a use by recruiting the Joan character that way. Also, this allowed the contemporary marginalisation of women in computing to be projected into the film; she is forced to prove herself to the doubtful men. I think it is an excellent film, and it spreads knowledge of the nature and importance of the work done by early computer scientists, and hopefully gives some people the inspiration to carry on that work (Computer Science, not GCHQ!). It is not a reference book; very few will even remember the kind of minutiae pointed out here. It's better to bring a lot of people most of the way to the truth, in a way that they enjoy; than to squabble over the last few mm, alienate almost everyone, present the field as toxic and jaded and make those few who stick around miserable.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
    Start here: http://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2mleat/the_imitation_game_or_how_the_breaking_of_the/ http://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2mleat/the_imita... http://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2mleat/the_imitation_game_or_how_the_breaking_of_the/cm6v96q http://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2mleat/the_imita... The movie doesn't even mention Tommy Flowers.
    - Nursie 12y ago
      To be fair it doesn't mention Colossus either, which was his major (and amazing!) contribution.
  - mason240 12y ago
    Someone submitted a critique to the BadHistory subreddit, the movie seems to diverge quite a bit from reality, and even tried to shoehorn in a a (female) love interest while making little mention of his actual orientation. http://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2mleat/the_imitation_game_or_how_the_breaking_of_the/ http://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2mleat/the_imita...
    - Nursie 12y ago
      Seriously? She wasn't treated so much as a love interest as an intellectual interest and a close friend. Having been to Bletchley Park some years ago, the tour guide pointed out the spot where the two of them would picnic together, so there was some truth to it. His orientation is mentioned infrequently and in hushed tones as it would have had to have been back then - it was criminal after all. I'm not saying it's an accurate movie, but it's no U-571 where hollywood decided it would be better if the Americans were the ones that captured the U-Boat and the enigma machine because it would play better to a US audience that way...
  - Nursie 12y ago
    You can (and the various geek communities have) nit-pick all day and point out inconsistencies. It treated his life sensitively, portrayed a little taste of the highs and lows of codebreaking and gave a sense of the profound tragedy of how the state treated him later on. I found it quite moving and quite beautiful.
    - cmdkeen 12y ago
      It unnecessarily accused him of treason via the whole Cairncross plot, I'm sure the concept of him being a hero cruelly treated by his country later would have been enhanced by leaving out that fabrication.
      - Nursie 12y ago
        I'm pretty sure that was a clumsy attempt to portray the bind he was in because of his homosexuality rather than accuse him of treason. He gives up the information to his MI6 contact in pretty much the next scene anyway doesn't he?
mabbo 12y ago
“On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” is a hugely important work, and Petzold's book "The Annotated Turing" makes it very accessible. I highly recommend anyone who is interested pick up a copy. High school education is all that's really needed. Turing was decades ahead of the rest of us. It's a shame that we're portraying him so inaccurately (though really, not nearly as shameful as how we treated him when he lived).
- termain 12y ago
  "Turing was decades ahead of the rest of us." That seems unfair to Alonzo Church.
  - peterfirefly 12y ago
    And Emil Post.
- Florin_Andrei 12y ago
  Well, if you consider the bewildering paradigm fracture, of cataclysmic proportions, that has occurred around that time in all fields of intellectual work (quantum mechanics, relativity, cubism, dadaism, modernism and the beginnings of post-modernism, James Joyce, Kurt Godel, etc., etc.) - the whole early 20th century was decades ahead of the rest of us, to say the least.
scott_s 12y ago
This is a good essay, and I am hesitant to see the film because I am worried that I will cringe every few minutes. But, I disagree with this sentence: "Everyone agrees that Alan Turing is a seminal figure in the computer revolution, so it's puzzling why these movies deliberately misrepresent his work." I sincerely doubt the movies deliberately misrepresent his work. Rather, I assume they honestly misrepresent his work, meaning that they tried to get it right, but they don't understand it well enough to do so.
- JshWright 12y ago
  I'm sure there were intentional decisions made to deviate from history in order to make a better film (I also don't have a big problem with that).
  - scott_s 12y ago
    I and the author are talking about his work (computer science), not his actions (history).
- gone35 12y ago
  I sincerely doubt the movies deliberately misrepresent his work. Rather, I assume they honestly misrepresent his work, meaning that they tried to get it right, but they don't understand it well enough to do so. Well, movies deliberately misrepresent everything, all the time --it's called artistic license! Accuracy (scientific or otherwise) is always a distant second to cinematic flair, or whatever is it studios are trying to optimize.
  - saraid216 12y ago
    Yup. That's why R'as al Ghul dies.
j2kun 12y ago
Considering the budget for these kinds of things, I'm shocked they don't just pay some theoretical computer scientists to read the script and provide feedback on the mathematical correctness of the lines. You don't even need to find great computer scientists; you'd root out this bug with graduate students.
- mikeash 12y ago
  Many productions do hire expert advisors. Various iterations of Star Trek had a real scientist at hand to ensure accuracy. Tons of bad science slipped through anyway. The monetary cost is small, but the time cost can be big. Writer time and attention is a scarce resource and time spent rewriting scripts for accuracy is time not spent polishing them for other things. And the simple fact is that scientific accuracy doesn't really sell. A movie with an otherwise good script that contains bad science will do far better than a movie with an otherwise bad script that contains good science. There isn't even much reason to think that improved science improves viewership at all. As far as I can tell, those productions that made attempts to portray accurate science did so because the people involved genuinely wanted to. Nerds flock to Star Trek and Star Wars and Gravity and other such movies even though they're full of problems. And if we're really being cynical, every "the problems with the science in Movie X" article written is just more free publicity for it.
BruceIV 12y ago
Odd that an article so nit-pickily concerned with the accuracy of the mathematics of Turing's work would over-generalize the actual computation he proved to be impossible, which was deciding if an arbitrary algorithm terminates on all possible inputs (i.e. there are no infinite loops), to "there are no bugs". The Annotated Turing is a great book though, I highly reccomend it (Turing's original paper is _very_ dense).
- j2kun 12y ago
  What do you mean by over-generalization? If you could solve the problem of determining if a program has a bug, you could solve the Halting problem. So it's just a generalization. Maybe it could be formalized more technically, but that makes it imprecise, not inaccurate.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    The formalized generalization is called Rice's Theorem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem It's pretty easy to figure out informally. If you had a program to figure out whether the output of a program is always correct for any definition of correctness, you could then write a trivial function around it that solves the halting problem: halts(program) { testFunction() { program() return correctImplementation() } return isCorrect(testFunction) } In short, make a function that runs the candidate program and ignore its output, then correctly perform whatever task you have a checker for. That function is correct iff the program halts. Since you can't determine whether an arbitrary program halts, and you can use any working isCorrect() implementation to determine whether an arbitrary program halts, there's no working isCorrect() implementation.
  - svantana 12y ago
    Halting has nothing to do with being bug-free -- lots of buggy programs halt, and some obviously bug-free programs may not halt (e.g. a brute force search to determine Goldbach's conjecture)
    - 12y ago
arketyp 12y ago
I once read a proof of Gödel's first incompleteness theorem that used a version of Turing's undecidability proof, which have had great impact on me. That being said, I find the point of this article, if not nitpicking, then asking too much of a Hollywood movie. I may be a bit cynical in suspecting Petzold sees an oppurtunity here to Google rank his book. With his famous paper, Turing (1) formalized the concept of the computation and (2) showed, analogously to Gödel, that there are some facts about computing that aren't reachable by computational means. He also did things like saving the world by decrypting the German Enigma machine. Yet he was a socially marginalized individual who died tragically because of it. I haven't seen the movie, don't know what it's about. But I know it's not made for computer scientists, and we should be glad that Turing is finally getting the recognition he desereves.
- Retric 12y ago
  saving the world by decrypting the German Enigma machine this is often repeated but mostly incorrect statement. Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski cracked v1 of the enigma in theory. So, Brittan was provided with full pictures of the insides plus an approach to crack it by some polish mathematicians, but they needed to build some actual physical devices. Also, the enigma design continued to be improved upon over time, but the basic approach more or less continued to work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski PS: Remember home grown heroes get all the credit whatever their actual contributions.
  - cmdkeen 12y ago
    The four rotor enigma change the Germany Navy adopted though was a significant change - and the decryption of that was something Turing was heavily involved in. In 1942 the Battle of the Atlantic was far from undecided and without cracking the naval Enigma it is entirely possible that Britain would not have been able to effectively stay in the war, or send convoys to Russia.
    - dspillett 12y ago
      > was a significant change - and the decryption of that was something Turing was heavily involved in. It was still much more of a team effort than usually presented though. It does irritate slightly the way that people concentrate on the code cracking and Turing as it seems unfair in to directions: it forgets the other people who also contributed significantly, and pretty much ignores the significant work that Turning did do largely solo.
jimhefferon 12y ago
To me, > any conceivable mathematical calculation can be done by a single device shuffling 1’s and 0’s back and forth seems right. It does not say that Turing's machine solves every problem. It says it does every conceivable calculation. That was Turing's contribution (anyway, one of them). The controversy at the time (1930's) was that there were a number of proposed definitions for what are conceivable mathematical computations (Kleene, Post, Herbrand ..). All of them gave schemes that the authors claimed were exhaustive. Turing's paper convinces a reader, as it convinced Godel, that his definition does indeed do everything mechanically possible (and everyone else's definitions, since they all prove to be equi-powerfull). Of course Godel knew there were unsolvable problems. The question was whether there was a single maximally-powerful device.
- skywhopper 12y ago
  A Turing machine can compute anything that can be mechanically calculated, but the key point here, which Godel proved, is that there are exist problems that cannot be mechanically calculated.
  - Florin_Andrei 12y ago
    If the brain is a computer, the implications are staggering. Basically, there can be no Theory Of Everything. Instead, all we can hope for is a loosely-coupled federation of local theories.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
drzaiusapelord 12y ago
This is why I think non-documentary movie making of the lives of historical people is a fool's errand. Of course Hollywood had to sex up Turing. He's a pretty boring guy by Hollywood hero standards. There was no big breakthrough with the Enigma. Well, there was, but it was a Polish team that figured it out. Obviously, his sexuality is a dramatic point in his life, but that's not much to build a movie on. I really wonder if a decent documentary team was granted 1/10th the budget of this movie, what would their output be? Probably a decent and educational flick. Its also a weird production. I'm not even sure who made this movie. It seems that it was produced by a near non-entity called Black Bear Pictures out of NYC, which shows only this movie and three others on their webpage. It was directed by a nobody with 3 other mediocre films under his belt and written by a novice writer. It really has "pet indie project of a wealthy person or two" written all over it. Shame really, a more mature and historically serious team probably would have punched out a better film. There's a great Turing/Enigma/WWII film to be made, and this just isn't it. Considering its poor box office response (only 1m so far), I imagine this will be the only one, ever for Turing. I really feel his story is Spielberg or Scorsese worthy, but now alas, Turing is established as box office poison.
- melling 12y ago
  It looks like the movie is playing in only 8 theaters in the United States. I saw it in NYC where it was only playing in 1 theater. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/daily/chart/?view=1day&sortdate=2014-12-09&p=.htm http://www.boxofficemojo.com/daily/chart/?view=1day&sortdate... Sort by average and it wins. It was a very entertaining movie. It would do well in a wider release.
  - underwater 12y ago
    It is being released more widely. From Wikipedia: "The film will expand into additional markets in 12 December and will be released nationwide on Christmas day".
richieb 12y ago
The New Yorker had a pretty good review of this movie: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/01/keeping-secrets-2 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/01/keeping-secrets...

61 points by johndcook 12y ago

This is true, but there are so many other things horribly wrong with that film that it hardly seems worth mentioning that they screwed up the description of the Turing Machine's capabilities.

tokenadult 12y ago
What other things do you find wrong with that film? Do you think that the film detracts from the story of Turing's life, overall, or are the things wrong just Hollywood repackaging of a story that is still told in a meaningful way in the film? I'd like to support a movie that represents Turing's life fairly, but the film hasn't opened here yet, so I haven't had a chance to see it.
- jgrahamc 12y ago
  1. Turing did not write by himself to Churchill and get himself put in charge. He wrote with others and asked for more resources. 2. Pretty much all sequences with the Bombe are a cringe because they appear to be building a machine but not know what it is for. It's implied that it's a Turing Machine. 3. They apparently hadn't thought of using a crib resulting in a dramatic run back to Bletchley from the pub sequence to get the Bombe working. 4. John Cairncross didn't work in Turing's group. So the whole plot with Cairncross and Turing and blackmail is nonsense. 5. Gordon Welchman doesn't appear in the film and Hugh Alexander is instead credited with coming up with the Bombe diagonal board. 6. Turing is shown building a computer in his home in the early 1950s. Not likely. 7. Turing never told a Manchester police officer his entire life story revealing all of Bletchley's secrets. Also, he didn't try to stop the police investigation. He's the one that reported the burglary. 8. Joan Clarke wasn't recruited through a crossword competition, she was already known to be a bright mathematician. I could go on. Of course, none of this had to happen. I met the director and offered (for free) to help them get stuff right.
  - JshWright 12y ago
    > Joan Clarke wasn't recruited through a crossword competition, she was already known to be a bright mathematician. Yes, but without Gordon Welchman (the person who brought her on board), they needed some other story to explain how she was involved.
    - jgrahamc 12y ago
      Right. But why was Welchman missing? Didn't make any sense to me. The whole thing felt like someone read Hodges' book, put it down and wrote a fanfic version.
  - DennisP 12y ago
    I'm not claiming Turing actually built that computer, but I think he could have if he wanted to. Atanasoff and his grad student built a computer in 1939 with $650 in funding (equivalent to $8K today). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Vincent_Atanasoff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Vincent_Atanasoff
    - vezzy-fnord 12y ago
      And then Konrad Zuse's Z1 before that, which was electromechanical but actually programmable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_%28computer%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_%28computer%29 Sadly destroyed during WWII along with the original Z2 and Z3 machines.
  - chriswarbo 12y ago
    This is why we can't have nice things. These kinds of criticisms seem little more than trying to jump on an SEO bandwagon. It's important that the true accomplishments, history and acknowledgements are understood by the writers and others working on a production like this, but it does not matter so much that the film portrays exactly these. Just like SciFi writers should understand what is and is not possible, but are free to relax those limits in their stories. Firstly, it is not a documentary, it is a work of fiction which is "based on a true story". Secondly, we're not watching presenters telling us what's going on; we're watching actors playing characters. With that in mind, when I watched the film I not only enjoyed it immensely, but I also found it completely clear that the writers had their facts straight. I didn't once cringe at the presentation, which I often do when non-experts describe something technical which I understand. As for your individual points: 1) The intention of having Turing write to Churchill was to establish the (partially subconscious) arrogance of the Turing character, and his logical approach to solving problems. Mentioning Churchill's involvement at all gives the audience a clue to the importance of the work, which might otherwise be seen as conscription-dodging. This was more important for the film than making a realistic portrayal of the process of resource aquisition in wartime Britain. 2) There was definitely the feeling that nobody understood Turing's exact approach when he was designing the Bombe, but during the construction phase the only sense of confusion I got was whether their time was better spent on Turing's unproven machine or on their known, but inefficient manual approaches. The character of Joan guesses at one point that Turing is trying to build a Universal Turing Machine. There is no mention whether the Bombe itself is or is not such a machine, but as the film progresses, we see post-war Turing working on another machine which is most likely universal (presumably the Manchester Mark 1 or one of its successors). The Bombe was clearly a stepping-stone to get to this later machine, just as Turing hints that this machine is just a stepping-stone to some later, "smarter" machine. There is a strong implication that Turing's character doesn't regard these machines as distinct devices, but as the continual "upgrade" of the same core concept. That his first iteration wasn't universal doesn't matter. 3) Artistic license. The audience mustn't be bombarded by too many encryption concepts early on, but the story much march ahead, so why not use each one as a plot device? 4) It makes the film more interesting though. Again, it's not a documentary. It does give a sense of the paranoia of the period, and the double/triple/quadruple bluffs work very well to portray the intelligence of the characters, especially that Turing can't just think his way out of his problems (which is important, given how much Turing's intelligence had been put across earlier). This changes the character of the film from superhero Turing saving the day with his super brain, to a dangerous and intricate game between very capable people. 5) The fact it was mentioned at all shows that the history was known. The theatrical intension is clear: Turing's character needed the help of his team, even if he would not admit it. This minor plot point could be established without bringing in a new character for the audience to keep track of, so the attribution was shifted on to an existing character. Again, not a documentary. 6) That scene works well in his home, and benefits from the presence of the machine. It would be awkward to interrupt the conversation while they pop down the road to the University where it would have been in reality. 7) How else could it be told to the audience? Should Turing have been talking to himself while out on a run? The police interrogation provides a context for telling the story in the first place, as well as an impending darkness that it's not all going to end well (else he wouldn't be getting investigated). Having a bunch of eminent historians and scientists doing talking-head sequences interspersed with CGI infographics only works for documentaries. 8) The crosswords are a useful plot point, can be related to by the audience (using competitions to recruit secret spies would be especially effective at inspiring children) and are a nice little piece of trivia. The fact that they weren't very useful kind of ruins it though; hence they invented a use by recruiting the Joan character that way. Also, this allowed the contemporary marginalisation of women in computing to be projected into the film; she is forced to prove herself to the doubtful men. I think it is an excellent film, and it spreads knowledge of the nature and importance of the work done by early computer scientists, and hopefully gives some people the inspiration to carry on that work (Computer Science, not GCHQ!). It is not a reference book; very few will even remember the kind of minutiae pointed out here. It's better to bring a lot of people most of the way to the truth, in a way that they enjoy; than to squabble over the last few mm, alienate almost everyone, present the field as toxic and jaded and make those few who stick around miserable.
- SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
  Start here: http://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2mleat/the_imitation_game_or_how_the_breaking_of_the/ http://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2mleat/the_imita... http://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2mleat/the_imitation_game_or_how_the_breaking_of_the/cm6v96q http://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2mleat/the_imita... The movie doesn't even mention Tommy Flowers.
  - Nursie 12y ago
    To be fair it doesn't mention Colossus either, which was his major (and amazing!) contribution.
- mason240 12y ago
  Someone submitted a critique to the BadHistory subreddit, the movie seems to diverge quite a bit from reality, and even tried to shoehorn in a a (female) love interest while making little mention of his actual orientation. http://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2mleat/the_imitation_game_or_how_the_breaking_of_the/ http://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2mleat/the_imita...
  - Nursie 12y ago
    Seriously? She wasn't treated so much as a love interest as an intellectual interest and a close friend. Having been to Bletchley Park some years ago, the tour guide pointed out the spot where the two of them would picnic together, so there was some truth to it. His orientation is mentioned infrequently and in hushed tones as it would have had to have been back then - it was criminal after all. I'm not saying it's an accurate movie, but it's no U-571 where hollywood decided it would be better if the Americans were the ones that captured the U-Boat and the enigma machine because it would play better to a US audience that way...
- Nursie 12y ago
  You can (and the various geek communities have) nit-pick all day and point out inconsistencies. It treated his life sensitively, portrayed a little taste of the highs and lows of codebreaking and gave a sense of the profound tragedy of how the state treated him later on. I found it quite moving and quite beautiful.
  - cmdkeen 12y ago
    It unnecessarily accused him of treason via the whole Cairncross plot, I'm sure the concept of him being a hero cruelly treated by his country later would have been enhanced by leaving out that fabrication.
    - Nursie 12y ago
      I'm pretty sure that was a clumsy attempt to portray the bind he was in because of his homosexuality rather than accuse him of treason. He gives up the information to his MI6 contact in pretty much the next scene anyway doesn't he?

mabbo 12y ago

“On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” is a hugely important work, and Petzold's book "The Annotated Turing" makes it very accessible. I highly recommend anyone who is interested pick up a copy. High school education is all that's really needed. Turing was decades ahead of the rest of us. It's a shame that we're portraying him so inaccurately (though really, not nearly as shameful as how we treated him when he lived).

termain 12y ago
"Turing was decades ahead of the rest of us." That seems unfair to Alonzo Church.
- peterfirefly 12y ago
  And Emil Post.
Florin_Andrei 12y ago
Well, if you consider the bewildering paradigm fracture, of cataclysmic proportions, that has occurred around that time in all fields of intellectual work (quantum mechanics, relativity, cubism, dadaism, modernism and the beginnings of post-modernism, James Joyce, Kurt Godel, etc., etc.) - the whole early 20th century was decades ahead of the rest of us, to say the least.

scott_s 12y ago

This is a good essay, and I am hesitant to see the film because I am worried that I will cringe every few minutes. But, I disagree with this sentence: "Everyone agrees that Alan Turing is a seminal figure in the computer revolution, so it's puzzling why these movies deliberately misrepresent his work." I sincerely doubt the movies deliberately misrepresent his work. Rather, I assume they honestly misrepresent his work, meaning that they tried to get it right, but they don't understand it well enough to do so.

JshWright 12y ago
I'm sure there were intentional decisions made to deviate from history in order to make a better film (I also don't have a big problem with that).
- scott_s 12y ago
  I and the author are talking about his work (computer science), not his actions (history).
gone35 12y ago
I sincerely doubt the movies deliberately misrepresent his work. Rather, I assume they honestly misrepresent his work, meaning that they tried to get it right, but they don't understand it well enough to do so. Well, movies deliberately misrepresent everything, all the time --it's called artistic license! Accuracy (scientific or otherwise) is always a distant second to cinematic flair, or whatever is it studios are trying to optimize.
- saraid216 12y ago
  Yup. That's why R'as al Ghul dies.

j2kun 12y ago

Considering the budget for these kinds of things, I'm shocked they don't just pay some theoretical computer scientists to read the script and provide feedback on the mathematical correctness of the lines. You don't even need to find great computer scientists; you'd root out this bug with graduate students.

mikeash 12y ago
Many productions do hire expert advisors. Various iterations of Star Trek had a real scientist at hand to ensure accuracy. Tons of bad science slipped through anyway. The monetary cost is small, but the time cost can be big. Writer time and attention is a scarce resource and time spent rewriting scripts for accuracy is time not spent polishing them for other things. And the simple fact is that scientific accuracy doesn't really sell. A movie with an otherwise good script that contains bad science will do far better than a movie with an otherwise bad script that contains good science. There isn't even much reason to think that improved science improves viewership at all. As far as I can tell, those productions that made attempts to portray accurate science did so because the people involved genuinely wanted to. Nerds flock to Star Trek and Star Wars and Gravity and other such movies even though they're full of problems. And if we're really being cynical, every "the problems with the science in Movie X" article written is just more free publicity for it.

BruceIV 12y ago

Odd that an article so nit-pickily concerned with the accuracy of the mathematics of Turing's work would over-generalize the actual computation he proved to be impossible, which was deciding if an arbitrary algorithm terminates on all possible inputs (i.e. there are no infinite loops), to "there are no bugs". The Annotated Turing is a great book though, I highly reccomend it (Turing's original paper is _very_ dense).

j2kun 12y ago
What do you mean by over-generalization? If you could solve the problem of determining if a program has a bug, you could solve the Halting problem. So it's just a generalization. Maybe it could be formalized more technically, but that makes it imprecise, not inaccurate.
- mikeash 12y ago
  The formalized generalization is called Rice's Theorem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem It's pretty easy to figure out informally. If you had a program to figure out whether the output of a program is always correct for any definition of correctness, you could then write a trivial function around it that solves the halting problem: halts(program) { testFunction() { program() return correctImplementation() } return isCorrect(testFunction) } In short, make a function that runs the candidate program and ignore its output, then correctly perform whatever task you have a checker for. That function is correct iff the program halts. Since you can't determine whether an arbitrary program halts, and you can use any working isCorrect() implementation to determine whether an arbitrary program halts, there's no working isCorrect() implementation.
- svantana 12y ago
  Halting has nothing to do with being bug-free -- lots of buggy programs halt, and some obviously bug-free programs may not halt (e.g. a brute force search to determine Goldbach's conjecture)
  - 12y ago

arketyp 12y ago

I once read a proof of Gödel's first incompleteness theorem that used a version of Turing's undecidability proof, which have had great impact on me. That being said, I find the point of this article, if not nitpicking, then asking too much of a Hollywood movie. I may be a bit cynical in suspecting Petzold sees an oppurtunity here to Google rank his book. With his famous paper, Turing (1) formalized the concept of the computation and (2) showed, analogously to Gödel, that there are some facts about computing that aren't reachable by computational means. He also did things like saving the world by decrypting the German Enigma machine. Yet he was a socially marginalized individual who died tragically because of it. I haven't seen the movie, don't know what it's about. But I know it's not made for computer scientists, and we should be glad that Turing is finally getting the recognition he desereves.

Retric 12y ago
saving the world by decrypting the German Enigma machine this is often repeated but mostly incorrect statement. Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski cracked v1 of the enigma in theory. So, Brittan was provided with full pictures of the insides plus an approach to crack it by some polish mathematicians, but they needed to build some actual physical devices. Also, the enigma design continued to be improved upon over time, but the basic approach more or less continued to work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski PS: Remember home grown heroes get all the credit whatever their actual contributions.
- cmdkeen 12y ago
  The four rotor enigma change the Germany Navy adopted though was a significant change - and the decryption of that was something Turing was heavily involved in. In 1942 the Battle of the Atlantic was far from undecided and without cracking the naval Enigma it is entirely possible that Britain would not have been able to effectively stay in the war, or send convoys to Russia.
  - dspillett 12y ago
    > was a significant change - and the decryption of that was something Turing was heavily involved in. It was still much more of a team effort than usually presented though. It does irritate slightly the way that people concentrate on the code cracking and Turing as it seems unfair in to directions: it forgets the other people who also contributed significantly, and pretty much ignores the significant work that Turning did do largely solo.

jimhefferon 12y ago

To me, > any conceivable mathematical calculation can be done by a single device shuffling 1’s and 0’s back and forth seems right. It does not say that Turing's machine solves every problem. It says it does every conceivable calculation. That was Turing's contribution (anyway, one of them). The controversy at the time (1930's) was that there were a number of proposed definitions for what are conceivable mathematical computations (Kleene, Post, Herbrand ..). All of them gave schemes that the authors claimed were exhaustive. Turing's paper convinces a reader, as it convinced Godel, that his definition does indeed do everything mechanically possible (and everyone else's definitions, since they all prove to be equi-powerfull). Of course Godel knew there were unsolvable problems. The question was whether there was a single maximally-powerful device.

skywhopper 12y ago
A Turing machine can compute anything that can be mechanically calculated, but the key point here, which Godel proved, is that there are exist problems that cannot be mechanically calculated.
- Florin_Andrei 12y ago
  If the brain is a computer, the implications are staggering. Basically, there can be no Theory Of Everything. Instead, all we can hope for is a loosely-coupled federation of local theories.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

drzaiusapelord 12y ago

This is why I think non-documentary movie making of the lives of historical people is a fool's errand. Of course Hollywood had to sex up Turing. He's a pretty boring guy by Hollywood hero standards. There was no big breakthrough with the Enigma. Well, there was, but it was a Polish team that figured it out. Obviously, his sexuality is a dramatic point in his life, but that's not much to build a movie on. I really wonder if a decent documentary team was granted 1/10th the budget of this movie, what would their output be? Probably a decent and educational flick. Its also a weird production. I'm not even sure who made this movie. It seems that it was produced by a near non-entity called Black Bear Pictures out of NYC, which shows only this movie and three others on their webpage. It was directed by a nobody with 3 other mediocre films under his belt and written by a novice writer. It really has "pet indie project of a wealthy person or two" written all over it. Shame really, a more mature and historically serious team probably would have punched out a better film. There's a great Turing/Enigma/WWII film to be made, and this just isn't it. Considering its poor box office response (only 1m so far), I imagine this will be the only one, ever for Turing. I really feel his story is Spielberg or Scorsese worthy, but now alas, Turing is established as box office poison.

melling 12y ago
It looks like the movie is playing in only 8 theaters in the United States. I saw it in NYC where it was only playing in 1 theater. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/daily/chart/?view=1day&sortdate=2014-12-09&p=.htm http://www.boxofficemojo.com/daily/chart/?view=1day&sortdate... Sort by average and it wins. It was a very entertaining movie. It would do well in a wider release.
- underwater 12y ago
  It is being released more widely. From Wikipedia: "The film will expand into additional markets in 12 December and will be released nationwide on Christmas day".

richieb 12y ago

The New Yorker had a pretty good review of this movie: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/01/keeping-secrets-2 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/01/keeping-secrets...