The Imitation Game: Life Of Alan Turing

As a child, one could place a sheet of a paper containing a math problem in front of my eyes, and my eyes would be locked in a state of enthrallment. It was as if I was in my own world-- a numbers world. It would be until the problem was solved that my own self would return to the real world with a rushing sensation of pure happiness.

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).

Along with Carr using the extrinsic truth, he also made sure to include the intrinsic aspect to each example. The digital computer spoken of in the section wasn’t invented at the time, therefore Turing was only but assuming. Carr said in his article that Alan Turing proved the functions of the computer, but gives no details into how he proved it.

This idea is represented in the matrix by “The Desert of the Real” and the motifs of mirrors throughout the movie. The reflections represent the confusion toward the blurred line between reality and simulation. Similarly, this idea of the blurred line between reality and simulation is reflected with Cypher’s conversation with Agent Smith. A firm believer in the theory “ignorance is bliss”, Cypher prefers the ‘happier’ simulated life to the truth facing him. By emphasising this simulated environment, the Wachowski brothers allow us to analyse our own dependency on technology for our lives. Similarly, Card analyses this idea of human kind living in a simulacra in his novel Ender’s game. Not knowing the truth, Ender is deceived by his military superiors into believing that the real battle against the buggers was simply a computer game. “Real. Not a game.” After this sudden revelation, Ender cannot cope with his existence, and only finds redemption in religion. In both texts, the composers use textual forms to highlight the idea that computers are used to create a simulation which absorbs the user, hiding them from the realities of life.

What is Enigma? It is a mysterious thing that is hard to understand, even if possible. During World War II, Alan Turing took on the mission to break the code that so many people in Britain thought was impossible. Even though Alan Turing’s childhood was full of misery, he was able to break a seemingly unbreakable code, and became a war hero by saving countless of lives during World War II.

5 remarkable British scientists had gotten their hands on an actual Enigma machine smuggled out of Berlin. They had put tremendous effort into decoding the Nazi's messages by using their cryptanalytic abilities but had failed because of the lack of information on the machine's

“the keyboard for inputting letters, the scrambler unit for encrypting the letters and the lamp board for displaying the enciphered letters” (Lendl). In order to break the Enigma Machine, the code breakers had to find the daily settings that the German used and understand them. However, it is important to know that Polish cryptographers already broke the Enigma machine in 1932 as Marian Rejewski reconstructed a replica of the Enigma i.e. Bomba machine. However, Turing used Rejewski’s ideas and improved the bombe machine so that the machine could go through all the possible combinations of the Enigma rapidly (Lendl). The polish Bomba inspired Alan Turing for the construction of his own Bombe machine. The Bombe machine was crucial for the breaking of Enigma’s signals. This machine is not considered as a computer and does not perform calculation, but was designed “to carry out a systematic search to determine the following components of an Enigma key: the rotor order, the ‘rotor core starting positions’, and some of the ‘steckers’” (Carter). Due to the work of the Bletchley Park codebreakers, the United Kingdom had access to the German communications and could predict future naval attacks, this allowed the prevention of several

Today, the Turing Bombe is not used by the military, yet the machine inspires and reminds of the importance of sciences as World War II was won with the help of the scientific community. Now, the machines are exposed in the British Museum and are part of history. Soldiers and scientific community fought against the Nazis. After World War II, Alan Turing continued to devote himself for his passion of sciences, cryptanalysis, and computers. For instance, Turing is known as the father-creator of computers as in 1941, he designed the Colossus computer (Notes). In addition, he is recognized as an important figure in the scientific community and contributed largely to everyone’s lives, as computers are indispensable in today’s generation.

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

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

Turing's narrative could not have reached the public sphere, let alone become a political talking point, without significant academic groundwork. Scientific biographers and historians have provided the first vital building blocks for others to shape Turing into a distinct cultural presence. However, truly original secondary material is still scarce. 1 Surprisingly few volumes have been dedicated solely to studying Turing alone, of which most date from 1992 onwards.

The instant the film began I was captured unto a moment of imagination as the melodic piano symphony released me into a sensation of suspense. The Imitation Game is a 2014 Academy Award winning Biographical film and a fact-based story on English Mathematician, Logician and Cryptanalyst Alan Turing. During World War II he developed a complex system which had the capabilities of breaking an unbreakable Nazi Code, helping the Allies win the war. Although,

Defining intelligence is extremely difficult and researchers now think that there are lots of different aspects to it, including; social, logical, creative, emotional and practical intelligence. The correct representation of the word is arguably a matter of opinion as there are many different definitions. With this argument in mind, it makes the task of arguing a Computers level of intelligence (if any) harder as, ultimately, each person’s definition could be different. A part of being intelligent is the ability for something/someone to be able to think for themselves which most computers aren’t able to do as they are simply programmed to perform certain functions which means that they are not in control of their response. However modern technologies have the propensity to make decisions based on an input from an end user. For example Apples ‘Siri’ service turns voice commands in visual and audio responses.

In his paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Alan Turing sets out to answer the question of whether machines can think in the same humans can by conceptualizing the question in concrete terms. In simple terms, Turing redefines the question by posing whether a machine can replicate the cognition of a human being. Yet, some may object to the notion that Turing’s new question effectively captures the nature of machines’ capacity for thought or consciousness, such as John Searle. In his Chinese room thought experiment, Searle outlines a scenario that implies machines’ apparent replication of human cognition does not yield conscious understanding. While Searle’s Chinese thought experiment demonstrates how a Turing test is not sufficient to establish that a machine can possess consciousness or thought, this argument does not prove that machines are absolutely incapable of consciousness or thought. Rather, given the ongoing uncertainty of the debate regarding the intelligence of machines, there can be no means to confirm or disconfirm the conscious experience of machines as well as the consciousness of humans by extension of that principle.