Breaking Engma In The Imitation Game

The Enigma was created at the end of World War I and patented in 1919 by Arthur Scherbius, a German engineer. The Enigma was a electro-magnetic ciphering machine and it was used by the German military as a way of communicating securely. As time went on, the Enigma was updated, and made more secure. It was used throughout World War II until the end of the war, though the Germans didn’t realize that the Enigma had been cracked by the British.

The Imitation Game is a movie based on a real story, taking place in the isolated Bletchley Park in Sherborne, during WWII. Here, six chosen men, including Alan Turing, live and breathe the Enigma machine with hopes of breaking the code. Breaking it will enable them to listen to the messaged plans of the opposing Germans. Every night at midnight, the Germans alter the code settings to then be able to send a new message every morning at six am. Therefore, the code breakers only have eighteen hours to figure it out before it is reset, causing them to start over from scratch every morning. One of the six men is able to calculate that there are 159 million million million possibilities every time it resets, configuring a good 20 million years to try everything. Living in the small dorm-like rooms, completely surrounds the

For my critical feminist lens, I will be answering the question ‘How are men and women (masculinity and femininity) portrayed differently in the text?’. I intend to explore the portrayal of both men and women in the film ‘The Imitation Game’ directed by Morten Tyldum. Furthermore, I believe that the film portrays the patriarchal structure that is the basis of the portrayal of men and women.

What role did Allied codebreakers have in the outcome of World War II? Though cryptography did not decide the outcome of World War II, it was very successful in shortening the war. In the Pacific theatre, the Americans broke several codes, including the PURPLE and JN25 codes. Though they were unable to anticipate the Pearl Harbor attack, codebreaking did benefit the Americans at the Battle of Midway and with the assassination of Yamamoto. In Europe, the Allies worked together against Germany to break the ENIGMA naval code, allowing the Allies to maintain superiority in the Battle of the Atlantic. Breaking the Japanese and German codes allowed the Allies to gain an advantage in both theatres, bringing about a resolution to the war. From World

The reason as to why the Enigma Machine was a major objective and required a specific group of people to solve was because it dictated how the Germans communicated and was an extremely complex machine that only the most intelligent people could potentially solve. The Enigma Machine was a code-generating machine used by the Nazis during World War Two. What appeared to be a typewriter in a suitcase, the Enigma Machine had essentially 4 main components to itself: the keyboard, the lamp board, the plug board, and the rotors. The keyboard was arranged in a German QWERTZ layout. The lamp board was also arranged in the same manner as the keyboard, however with the lamp board, there were no buttons to press down on.

After receiving his doctorate in 1938, Alan Turing returned to Cambridge, England and took a part-time position at a British code-breaking organization known as the “Government Code and Cypher School”. Whenever the Second World War broke out, Alan Turing was one of the leading participants in code-breaking against the axis powers (Turing would try to break the code of German ciphers in particular). During his time at Bletchley Park, the Government Code and Cypher School wartime station, Alan Turing broke the German’s Enigma Machine”, a machine that would transmit secret Nazi information that only the Germans could read. In addition to this, Alan Turing would go on to make an experiment called a “Turing Test” that was made to see whether or not machinery developed artificial

This made it easier to take on the German High Command with a bold disinformation operation, such as Mincemeat. Because of the amount of outrage that was being expressed by the public after the Pearl Harbor attacks and the massive war casualties in Europe that governments of the warring countries were under heavy pressure. Another factor that contributed to the success of the operation was the careful execution of the plan by the British intelligence. The other important factor was that the Allies had been fighting the Germans for almost 3 years in Europe, Africa and elsewhere so they had begun to understand their enemy making it easier to defeat them. The amount of money spent on the war and soldiers lost was unbearable for people who were dragged into the war and the only chance of Ally nations surviving and winning was to take on the Germans aggressively and right away or Hitler might dominate the entire landscape of the European

Additionally, Britain’s success in the battle for the Atlantic was also crucial to the outcome of the war. In order for the allies to have won the battle, they needed to not only avoid the U-boats but also attack them (Pearson, 162) they managed to do this by cracking the Enigma code where the Germans were sending coded messages to and from submarines. The allies had an enigma machine before the outbreak of World War II which helped British code breakers stationed at Bletchley Park to crack the Enigma code. (IA SOURCE) This is considered to be crucial to the outcome of the war as the Allies had an intelligence advantage over the Axis powers, allowing the allies to know exactly what and where the Germans were planning to attack. The Enigma codes

hidden humans. In any given session, there would be six imitation games running in parallel, and one given interrogator would meet all five answering machines and five hidden humans. The authors claim that the judges and hidden humans involved all were selected from a wide variety of backgrounds—both male and female, both adults and teenagers, some who already knew about the Turing test beforehand and others who did not. In this paper, the authors examined the data they had acquired in the tests to study what constitutes good machine performance in Turing’s imitation game.

While bloody fights were taken place, the communication war raged on in secrecy. Bletchley Park is where the fight mostly took place. In the late 1930’s in a remote area outside London, lived a mansion (Gladwin). This mansion was soon to be converted into a super-secret compound called Bletchley Park. The park was surrounded by small cottages in which students from the local colleges were recruited from to live there (Gladwin). Their task was to decipher all types of encoded messages in secrecy away from the public eye. Soon to be there was the infamous Alan Turing. Although it was mainly a code breaking facility, there was not a more daunting task to decode messages coming from the infamous German machine Enigma. Enigma was an encrypting type righter which used rotors which created nearly impossible trillion different results each time it sent out a message (Gladwin). It was nearly impossible to decipher by just using paper. Turing had an idea of creating a large machine in which could emulate nearly thirty six Enigmas at any time while running (Gladwin). The machine Turing had created was known as a bombe. Soon after they would use these bombes to crack the Enigma codes being sent from the Germans (Gladwin). Although Bletchley Park was one of the main places, in an interview with Jean Valentine, it was found that by the end of the war there was at least five other places where bombes were stationed at (Lewis). This machine was one of the first successful models of its kind. Also in the interview Jean states that, “These machines did the equivalent work of 36 Enigmas and 200 of them were working 24 hours a day…” (Lewis). Bombes were one of the most successful machines of its time for breaking the Enigma. Secrecy was also a key component in Bletchley Park. In the interview with Jean Valentine, it was found that if anyone asked them about what they were doing they were to tell others that

The movie, The Imitation Game, follows the story of a remarkable and brilliant English mathematician, named Alan Turing, who helped win World War II, all the while hiding aspects of his life to succeed. In 1939, during World War II, Germany used a machine called Enigma which sent encrypted radio messages with military instructions, it was primarily used to sink English convoy and passenger ships. During this time, Turing is hired by the commander of the Royal Navy with the task of decoding the encrypted messages. This mission is deemed impossible, however with his strong determination, Alan devises a plan to construct a machine to beat the “crooked hand of death”. After two long, hard years, Alan, with the assistance of five other brilliant

The discoveries made at Bletchley Park could be used as an advantage due to the intelligence both coming in the door and that of those who worked there resulted in a slow progression towards the pattern of Enigma becoming understood. The understanding and knowledge of Enigma and major German military tactics allowed for the Allies to have control, yet they knew the push to take the advantage of Germany meant understanding the Enigma Code. Even when the British had cracked the code, they deliberately always gave credit to their reconnaissance scouts, agents, and spies to keep the Germans unaware that Enigma had been

“With German invasion imminent in 1939, the Poles opted to share their secrets with the British, and Britain's Government Code and Cipher School (also known as GC&CS) Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, became the centre for Allied efforts to keep up with dramatic war-induced changes in Enigma output.” (Andrew Lycett, BBC.co.uk) If the Allies had access to decoded German communication, then they would have the upper hand. The Germans were so confident in the Enigma code that they used it to encrypt most all of their messages during the war. Since it was a difficult and sensitive task, Bletchley Park needed Britain’s best minds to work together. “He (Alan Turing) was already working part-time for the British Government’s Code and Cypher School before the Second World War broke out. In 1939, Turing took up a full-time role at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire-” (Imperial War Museums). Alan Turing was a very intelligent mathematician and at this point, he was proving this to many others. His genius was exactly what this problem needed. After Britain declared war on Germany, they immediately sent people to work on cracking the Enigma. It was believed to be an impossible task, and yet they put their best efforts into working on it with the help of

What is the Enigma Machine: The enigma machine was a coding device that was used by the Germans during World War 2 to write, send, and decipher encrypted messages.

Germany was the greatest ally of Japan during the war. Alperovitz explains that through the use of the deciphered Japanese codes which somehow detailed the alarm the Japanese felt after the fall of its allies, US presumed that Japan was indeed greatly affected and threatened by the reality that Germany had already fallen. When Germany acknowledged its defeat, this incident was seen as a warning by most of the Japanese officials.US on the other hand actually realized that Japan knew that they can also be defeated by the Allied forces. Thus this was one proof that Japan was already weakened even before the atomic bomb was to be used.