Essay On 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

     The Turing Test has had a rich history since its creation by Alan Turing. But first of all, who was Alan Turing? As Whitby notes Alan Turing was a superb British mathematician. During World War II Turing worked in secrecy for the British military to break the German military codes together with some other scientists using some machines that had some characteristics of the modern computers.(12) After the War, a machine was built in Manchester from which “all modern computers are descended”.(12) In 1948, Alan Turing was writing programs for this machine and was also writing the paper “Computing machinery and intelligence”, published in 1950, from which the concept of the Turing Test was derived later on. (Whitby 13).

Andrew Hodges brings Alan Turing to life in the namesake title, Alan Turing: The Enigma. Alan Turing, a war hero in his own right, worked during World War II at Bletchley Park in England which was the site housing British codebreakers for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS). One of his main objectives was to crack the German Enigma machine’s code. Turing’s work was crucial to the war, and beyond that, he is known as the father of computer science and a brilliant mathematician.

The story took place in 1941 at Bletchley Park by the time of World War II. Alan Turing was working as a Mathematics professor in Cambridge University. He was an expert in solving the puzzles and he was hired by government to break the secret code, when Britain declared a war on Germany. Alan and other members formed as a team to break the secret code named as Enigma. Except Alan remaining members were breaking day to day codes they believe that this the only way can decode the secret codes. Mean while Alan working to prepare a

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

In 1936 Alan Turing, an English mathematical and a logician created the “Turing machine” (Copeland, 2000) which was originally created for the purpose a mathematical tool, it represented a computing device that contained a read/write head or a scanner with a paper tape passing through it. This machine could

Most historically based movies try to reenact exactly what happened in the historical events that took place, while others have added twists to them, like a change in storyline, proving its historical inaccuracy. The 2001 film Enigma stars Tom Jericho, a British mathematician who solved the German Enigma code, “shark”, the first time around and is called back into Bletchley Park to do it again. While doing so, he teams up with his ex-girlfriend’s roommate, Hester Wallace, to detect why his ex, Claire Romilly, has disappeared and discovered secret information on the Katyn Forest Massacre and a German spy in the British Intelligence System. This movie is both historically accurate and inaccurate because the information it provided about the German Enigma, Bletchley Park, and the Katyn Forest Massacre is true, yet some details behind the characters Jozef Pukowski and Tom Jericho are falsely stated. In reflecting upon the movie, it is obvious the producers were sticking to a particular agenda in altering storylines related to other historical figures to keep it centered around the British and Germans in order to avoid confusion while it also presented a new perspective in seeing the significance this Enigma War had to the Allies’ success in WW II, even though the historical value of the film didn’t seem real at first.

Within the last thirty years, the pioneering British computer scientist and Cambridge academic Alan Mathison Turing (1912-1954) has undergone an astonishing reappraisal. His major work on breaking Enigma Codes, his key 1936 paper On Computable Numbers (describing a theoretical machine that could solve any mathematical problem given enough time), and his early digital machines such as the programmable Pilot ACE (most notably his work at the University of Manchester between 1947 and 1954) was unquestionably used and appreciated while he still lived.1

The Bombe, made by Alan Turing was a more propelled adaptation of the Polish Bomba that was likewise worked to decipher German Nazi codes in Poland. The movie never addressed mathematician Gordon Welchman, which was Turing's in making the Bombe (Bletchley Park: Code-breaking's Forgotten Genius). The Bombe has really been worked by five code breakers not simply Turing. The film just specified Alan Turing's name.

Even though the Enigma was difficult to hack, Alan Turing made use of its flaws in the creation of the Bombe. The Enigma appeared perfect in use of encrypted messages but it used keys within the machine that were considered weak. Knowing that this vulnerability is present, the Bombe was able to decrypt the message with a method known as brute force. Brute forcing allowed the Bombe to “try out all the possibilities one after another” (Hodges, 1983). Through the long exploration of all the different possibilities, a code would be broken. Although brute force was just an aspect of what made the Bombe great, it still played a major role in the use of the Bombe. With the creation of the Bombe, Alan Turing was able to hack the Enigma through a tool that he created in order help others. Although this hack was considered good, other people would begin to hack for more malicious

Turing's obscurity continued until a series of initial exposés and speculation on how military intelligence was obtained sparked further (if limited) interest in the history and applications of early digital computing. 9 The semi-speculative book Bodyguard of Lies also kick-started interest in Turing's links to the British ULTRA intelligence network. Amidst several competitors, Cave Brown correctly assumed his central role in cracking Enigma and Lorenz ciphers using digital machines from research and anecdotal evidence, despite making a series of wider factual errors and misinterpretations in his work highlighted by Hugh Trevor-Roper. 10

During the World War II, Alan Turing led the works of the British World War II codebreaking station which name is the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, which was tasked with solving German naval (Kriegsmarine) Enigma messages. By producing the modified Bombe which was a device previously found by Polish scientists that known as 'Bomba', Alan took their early versions and developed it into an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine, which greatly helped in the breaking of the Enigma code used by the German forces, and finally

The codebreakers housed at Station X, the facility established at Bletchley Park as the British codebreaking center during the war, developed new methods in 1940 to enable them to continue to decipher German air force and army communications. However, German naval messages, including information on U-boat traffic, remained undeciphered. As such, U-boats continued to sink such a large number of merchant ships taking food, munitions, and oil to Britain from North America that by 1941 some analysts were predicting that the sinkings would tip Britain into starvation within a few months. In June 1941 British mathematician Alan M. Turing and his group at Bletchley finally succeeded in breaking into the daily communications of the U-boats. Decoded messages revealed the positions of the submarines, enabling ships to avoid contact.

William perfected this by turning it into something called a diagonal board. Finally, Alex finalized this invention and it because a sort of cabinet, which they called The Bombe. This invention later became known as the Turing-Welchman Bombe.