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It makes sense in the context of the narrative - which is 'oddball outsider runs contrary to all expectations and succeeds spectacularly through his unique perspective'. Not speaking German made him the underdog and made for a funny exchange with the Commander (not to mention the audience can be sympathetic towards him more easily).
I feel like the biggest problem with the way Alan Turing is portrayed in the movie is that he's portrayed with just offensively one dimensional autism spectrum trait stereotypes almost completely erasing his humanity and personality at times. Such a missed opportunity to portray a brilliant and quirky individual.
That's exactly what annoyed me. They effectively erased his actual character. He was a legitimately interesting man and I found it offensive that he was reduced to a stereotype. It felt lazy, like they didn't do any research.
Yeah, as an aspie myself I almost immediately noticed they were trying to make him aspie (which there's questionable evidence for in the first place), but ended up making him just an ass.
I think they felt they needed some driving conflict early in the movie. Else it's just a guy going to a job interview. The late-movie conflict was easy - his persecution for his sexuality. But for the beginning, they manufactured conflict by making their main character stereotypically insufferable against everyone around him.
What I would've do e, and there are traces of this in the movie, is went with the "this is no joking matter" approach, as in the enigma is the villain. I believe they went too dar in the direction of the general being an antagonistic fool. It would've been interesting to have a lighter cipher be cracked by Turing for an interview, or even as little as rattling off his achievements while also giving other candidates the spotlight.
The worst disservice to Turing was having the framing device be him spilling national secrets to some random policeman who was interviewing him. Nobody involved ever told anybody at all until it was declassified in the 1970s. So the movie shows him committing treason, which carried a death penalty even after the war. About his time in Manchester, he was using a computer designed and built by other people because his own project, the Ace at NPL (National Physics Laboratory) was taking too long for his taste. After he left, the NPL team finished a reduced version named Pilot Ace and later a few machines followed the same style. But while the Manchester machine would look very familiar to us, the Turing design was very odd and ended up being a dead end in the evolution of computers.
As a German Turning has a special place in my life. My grandpa and his brother fought in WW2, were prisoners of war and both had scientific jobs. After the war one was living in West Germany and one East Germany. So a split family. My father was an officer in the Bundeswehr (German Army) and he had a book called: Enigma by Robert Harris. I read it as a teenager and was fascinated by it. This is one reason I chose a very specific career path. After school I also joined the Bundeswehr and became an officer myself. I got a diploma in computer science and dug into cryptography. We had one trimester of number theory and cryptography and worked also through the inner workings of the Enigma. After 12 years I left the Bundeswehr and now I am working in the field of information security. I can say: We need strong cryptography, a strong and peaceful Europe, and we need to share with all people around the globe. I talked to hackers from over 20 countries and it's everywhere the same story. History must not repeat itself. Thank you for this great video!
8:10 - this reminds me of Sully where for similar reason they portrayed NTSB as villains where in reality they were absolutely on the crew’s side in their finding. I contrast it with The Martian which demonstrated that you can have a good film without a conscious antagonist. But I guess some film makers are stuck with thinking that ‘man vs man’ is the only possible source of tension in a story.
All Hollywood biopic type films are like this. ___ was down on his/her luck but he/she's determined to ____ no matter what those snobs in _____ think or even their best friend! Despite constant doubt they finally did it alone! Also there's a love interest.
Apollo 13 was another one. In the movie, Swigert (Bacon) is shown as having somewhat questionable ability, and there is tension with the rest of the crew. In reality, he was extremely competent and Lovell and Haise had complete confidence in him.
I'm personally sick to bloody death of man vs man conflict in stories. Even Man vs Himself/His "inner demons" is overdone. I'd love to see more movies where the source of conflict is something else entirely - the weather or a tricky puzzle or a broken piece of essential equipment and an incomplete toolkit! Anything that has serious stakes and the potential to make life harder for the protagonists but have the people actually *_get along_* and _help_ each other for once.
"Sitting at a desk for _dozens_ of hours every day"? Assuming that's not every hour of every day, I'm impressed that you found a way to cram more than the standard 2 dozen hours into a day! 😉
@@AnotherRoofwouldn't that contract your time, making it so the desk experiences even fewer than two dozen hours per day? I might be wrong and in need of a refresher on relativity theory, though.
My pet peeve was that during the ending they say something like "today we call Turing machines computers". Like, no, that's not true at all. The concept of Turing machines (and also Turing completeness etc.) has a specific meaning, it's not a synonym for computer and it's still used in computer science today. I think this actually does a big disservice to Turing, because when people learn what the Turing machine actually is, they will think "ok so the film was full of BS, I guess they tried to inflate Turing's contribution to computing while the only thing he did was some mathematical concept".
I think some math correspondent was enthusiastically sharing how Turing machines are "equivalent" to general purpose computers in their expressive power to recognize the same class of languages modern computers can recognize, but this got jumbled up by a lot of movie people until it reached the writers where they said what they said about "Today we call Turing machines computers".
It is absolutely a synonym for computer. The general purpose computer only differs from a Turing machine in that it has a finite memory, that's all. A Turing machine is an idealized general purpose computer with a potentially infinite store of memory, so it never runs out. That's the mathematical definition.
Why would you make this comment? It is ridiculous, you speak as if you understand the concepts, and if you actually understood them, you would know that "Turing machine" is a synonym for "computer", while "Turing completeness" means "can be used as a general purpose computer".
@@annaclarafenyo8185 Technically a Turing machine is a particular model of computation. It is useful for modelling the concept of computability. If you are interested in finer questions regarding computational complexity there are some subtleties. If you want talk about linear time computation then there is a distinction between single-tape and multi-tape turing machines, for example.
A Turing machine is a theoretical model for reasoning about computability. A computer (nowadays) is a physical object that computes things. They're not unrelated, but one is not an instance of the other. You wouldn't call some other Church-Turing equivalent model of computation like the iota combinator a computer, or call a computer an iota combinator.
I found the film so grating because what I knew/remembered was so much more interesting than the watered-down, time-displaced narrative in the film. like, the Poles demonstrated they could break Enigma, but what they couldn't do was afford to build lots of additional bombes for each permutation of cipher wheels
I was actually wanting to do a deep dive into how this movie did turing dirty for a long time now! I haven’t had a chance to watch just yet but excited to tonight!
I did really like 'The Imitation Game', though it was fairly obvious that it wasn't too historically accurate. I kind of put it in the same vein as "A Beautiful Mind," which embellishes (and outright retcons) history for the sake of a narrative. It's definitely possible to have both historical accuracy and a fulfilling narrative, but it's definitely hard.
I think "A Beautiful Mind", while not historically accurate, is more historically accurate than "The Imitation Game" but again I don't think just being historically inaccurate is a bad thing. It's the way in which they do it. The historical inaccuracies of "The Imitation Game" just make Turing seem like an asshole, his mathematician colleagues seem like idiots/haters, military people are made to seem like idiots, and it's just generally kind of cringe.
I do like historical drama, but I almost feel like there should be a contractual obligation to also produce a documentary which clarifies which choices were made for dramatic purposes, and which are historically accurate. Often I’ll read a Wikipedia page after watching a movie like that, but that’s not ideal either.
I'm with you, it's not only deeply offensive but also just a bad film! It also bizarrely feels like offensive autism representation for a person we have zero evidence was autistic - like Cumberbatch or the film team saw he was a mathematician, just assumed autistic from that and then barely bothered to research autism
What offended me most is that, in reality, Poles did the heavy lifting. Brits built and operated the huge array of "bombes" invented by Poles and used at the beginning of the effort. Turing worked out Colossus to solve the tougher naval Enigma after they had been decrypting the simpler stuff for a long time. They also don't mention that the Friedmans in D.C. routinely decrypted hundreds of Enigma messages, mostly from agents in South America, without the help of bombes. Little reported is that the Germans cracked all the ciphers used by the Allies. The Germans were unable to use the results because the various agencies within the German government who broke various ciphers didn't talk to one another or to the people who needed the decryptions, because they were jockeying for power.
Your second paragraph is just not true at all, for one D-days deception would have failed then and they would have beefed up Normandy, yet even after the allies had landed on the beach they thought the real attack would land in Calais. Germany didn't know they had machines to crack engima quicker than they could translate it themsleves. Secondly Italy was better at code breaking than Germany. Germany had a quite significant drop in information after Italy surrendered. Now if they solved ever cipher ever, why did that happen... Not to mention in the end the allies copied the Engima however changed it to not have the flaw of not repeating the letter and Germany didn't even know they'd done that. The irony that you were upset they spread misinformation and spread your own is very ironic. Also Tommy Flowers deisgned and built Colossus.
Pardon me for speaking like a mathematician, but that’s my gig. I was an Army cryptanalyst and I’m now a math & science teacher. Historical fiction (HF) as a genre spans a vast literary and historical space. To the degree that it touches on real people or comes close to significant events, it moves toward factual revisionism, urban mythology, propaganda and all manner of apocryphal narrative sourcing. It’s just profoundly irresponsible to creatively embellish true and important history with what are known falsehoods. This contrasts sharply with guessing and filling in the blanks as even the best scholars are inclined to do. When we inject intentional errors into the minds of audiences who believe what they are seeing to be framed in mostly true history, we distort popular notions of reality. The higher order implications include increased social and philosophical controversy for no reason other than theatrics. Therefore, we should be especially careful tolerating dramatic embellishments where evidence or factuality matter. This also applies to current events. No amount of entertainment will ever ethically or morally justify the intentional dumbing down of society. It is fundamentally a vile practice and it should always be rejected.
I agree with you. As I watch a movie, I don't take anything for granted. For example I don't think John Nash thought of his "Nash equilibrium" while he was at a bar with his 3 buddies looking at a group of 4 women one of which was hotter than the others. A Beautiful Mind didn't mislead me into thinking that was the case. But I was amazed at how many details from The Imitation Game were just plain false. Like with the Soviet spy. I know nothing can be taken for granted but for sure if they put that in the movie, there must have been something between Turing and a Soviet spy. The thing with the bell at midnight: I was kind of shocked to hear that there was nothing even close to that in the real story. Of course you can't trust movies but surely they put that in there because at midnight everyone had to stop working yesterday's codes and start working on the next day's codes. Maybe there's just no bell, maybe it's just the supervisor that comes in the room and tells everybody to move on to the next day's codes. And now I hear it's just "nope, we invented that part oopsie".
While Turing was definitely ahead of his time in his thoughts about thinking machines, I think it's important to note that he was far from the first to do so. Ada Lovelace, at the end of her seminal paper in which she described the first computer program for Babbage's Difference Engine, had a whole section of then-fanciful speculation about what such computing devices could one day do: compose music, discover mathematical proofs, etc. Creative endeavors often thought of as uniquely human, she understood could be performed with enough calculation... and now we have AI that does all the things she imagined. I don't know whether Lovelace was the first to think about such things in such contexts, but she was certainly prescient about it at a level of understanding most people weren't until the 1950s at best. (Sorry, I know this is a Turing video; but I'm a big fan of Lovelace, so I had to mention that 😅)
@@cube2fox Not as far as I'm aware. He built the machine, but hadn't actually written any programs for it. He collaborated with Lovelace to help him figure that part out.
@@IceMetalPunk This is like claiming that the various inventors of calculators didn't ever use it to calculate anything, or that the inventors of early computers like Z3 or ENIAC didn't themselves ever come up with any programs for it. Or like saying the inventors of the C programming language never wrote any C programs, etc. Which would all be _completely_ ridiculous.
@@cube2fox What? How is it like that at all? Babbage and Lovelace worked together on the development of the Difference Engine. It was a collaboration. When Lovelace wrote the paper detailing the algorithmic implementation, Babbage wasn't even finished building the machine yet. I never said Babbage never programmed it, I said Lovelace wrote the *first* program for it.
As someone who has looked up to Turing since I was a child this film was such a terrible disappointment. It seems so sad to me that they didn't take the opportunity to tell the real story of this amazing man and how terribly he was betrayed by his country. Instead they chose to make a cliché that is so much less interesting than the true story.
At the risk of voicing an unpopular opinion here, I think the reason why they portrayed Turing the way the did in the film is pretty obvious - the actor. Benedict Cumberbatch always plays some small variation on the same character in essentially every single movie/drama he's cast in: some kind of brilliant/maverick genius, that is very much aware of his superior intellect/power and has to display it at every opportunity. (Clearly), some people find this kind of character very entertaining and believable - I personally do not. But it is what it is and I suspect the portrayal in the Imitation Game likely had a lot to do with this.
Mentioning other early visionaries, in 1922 a guy named Lewis Fry Richardson published a plan to do weather forecasting using massive multi-core parallelized computing. Of course, he was talking about human computers, but speculating on the important aspect of how even with fast computers, for large problems, the limitations quickly become message passing.
As you noted, it's fascinating how Turing was able to foresee so much of the subsequent technological development. He was thinking about issues that were still a century away! What really blows my mind is that he worked this all out on a PURELY THEORETICAL level! He was NOT a "computer scientist" (or a scientist of any kind). He was a mathematician and logician. His only experiments were "thought experiments". So with nothing more than (at most) a pencil and pepper, he predicted the inevitable rise of artificial intelligence at a time when only 1 in 10 people owned a telephone. Let that sink in. AND he helped defeat the Nazis. And then the British government forced him to undergo chemical castration, which caused him to commit suicide. That's why I'm an anarchist. Power is always disgusting. But I digress... Rest in peace, Mr. Turing. You deserved so much better. 😔
Hollywood has always had a bad habit of ALWAYS presenting smart people, a.k.a. "nerds", as being, on one hand clumsy autistic cartoonish virgins, and on the other hand extreme antisocial self-entitled assholes. Have your cake and eat it too why don't you. It clearly shows how these writters / producers can be so detached from the reality of being smart in real-life that they end-up imagining cartoonish characters who fortunately are not at all like that in real life. I mean c'mon. That is the reason why I deeply hate and despise shows like "The Big Bang Theory" or "Sherlock", the latter apparently being the acting template that Cumberbatch pulls out of his sleeve every time he has to play a smart person borderlining on genius. Not only they misrapresent intelligence but they apparently don't understand eccentrism and introvertion either. I mean, ok I get it when you have fantasy characters, but how could they not get it right in regards to real people such as for example John Nash in "The Beautiful Mind" or Alan Turing in "The Imitation Game", and fail to such a degree? [Ok granted, Rusell Crowe did a better job as he at least tried to be more delicate, more reserved in his portrayal of Nash. He did not dial "nerdness" up to 5000 and make a parody of it. In overall he did a better job in his acting, he was mostly limited by the poor writting]. And as for Turing, it's a shame because he was a promising individual who was just at the beginning of his discoveries and who knows how much deeper he could've impacted for the better the world in which we live and take for granted. They did not do him any favors in life and they are not doing to him any after death and I do not like the fact that Benedict Cumberbatch seems so pleased and proud with his portrayal of Turing.
The truth is that the writers and producers aren't detached from reality. In fact, they're so connected to reality that they know what the vast majority of the public want to see, and they make money doing it.
Actually, the purpose is probably more to project the archetype of the "asshole smart person" in everyone's psyche. The writters do it for their own reasons, as detached and antisocial as they themselves are, but the financing behind that repetitive archetype's presence in Hollywood movies comes from another goals : Make people suffer, so they consume to cope. It also project the archetypenon a lot of smart people who actually think "that's how intelligent people should behave". Not every high IQ individual took the time to make their EQ as strong. Tldr : It's basically a huge trap in the culture.
Hollywood has the same issue with its depiction of atheists. Either you get the assholes like Dr. House, or the "detached from emotions and pop culture" like Dr. Temperance Brennan. But that is an overlap of the problem you mention: fiction often portrays an unrealistic separation between emotions and intelligence. The smarter a character is, the more aloof and detached from society they are; and vice-versa, there's often an "emotional savior" character that tries to "help them connect" with their Normal Intelligence EQ Abilities™ (Wilson in House, Booth in Bones, etc.) As much as I loved Fringe, they *really* dug into that terrible trope towards the end with the Observers, revealing (spoiler alert for a years-old show) that they "made themselves so smart, they lost their emotional connections". And don't get me started on the stereotypes of *every main character* in The Big Bang Theory. (Oh, yeah, they have the "emotional savior" character, too, in Penny!) I think it's a pretty damaging trope, to be honest: it makes people distrust intelligence and actively *want* to avoid learning, for fear they'll become just as detached or douchey. It makes people think they have to choose between emotions or intelligence -- and who would ever want to be smart if it means they can't love? We definitely need more human portrayals of smart character in popular media. Honestly, one of my favorite Smart Person characters was Toby Curtis in the show "Scorpion"... which is sad, because that show had *terrible* writing overall 😂But he was at least human and not just a stereotype, while also being intelligent and an expert in his field.
@@3Max "they know what the vast majority of the public want to see" Some highly marketed movies that ended up being huge flops tend to disprove this. And so do some other movies ending up being huge successes through spectator's recommendations despite the producers making no efforts at all because they didn't believe in them. Major Hollywood producers know above all the unofficial rulebook which indicates that all movies must include a well known set of stereotypical scenes even if half of them make absolutely no sense in the context of the story the movie is trying to tell. They are ready to ruin a nice and consistent scenario and script just so they have their complete list of pet peeve scenes. The point in this video about creating an antagonist with Commander Denniston is one of those examples. They insult that officer's memory by portraying him as a petty bureaucrat who understands nothing at maths while he was in reality a codebreaker himself with great knowledge of state of the art cryptology. the only reason for that is they wanted their "antagonist chief that represents incompetent petty hierarchy that slows down the genius efforts always asking for immediate results while the genius is working on something bigger". This is a deviation of our post-industrial society where money is the alpha and omega of everything. This wasn't the case during WWII. Truth is their hierarchy was fully aware of the importance of all this and did everything financially and physically to ensure the cryptology team had everything they needed. Of course they kept track of payments in accounting books. That doesn't mean they contested every single demand.
The joke that "they got that his name was Alan" is doubly funny to me since the audio description for the film says "based on the book by Alan Hodges". The book is by Andrew Hodges. Anyway, best part of TIG is by far the soundtrack, which I still listen to.
Not forever. Probably to so me time in his mid 50s when one day, without any obvious changes, he will suddenly look a spry 70, which will then be his appearance until he dies at the age of 127.
Oh wow very excited to see this. Is it your first collab? I discovered you first when you did that Fermat Descartes video, so really looking forward to more maths history
Hidden Figures or Marguerite's Theorem next? Props to EVA Air for having two films ostensibly about mathematics in their in-flight entertainment! Watched them back to back on the way back from Taiwan, keen to hear your take on either :)
It is yet to come a good Mathematician's movie with proper Math consultants. I mean, for the Queen's Gambit they were able to get Garry Kasparov as a consultant... I would love to see Math influencers being invited as consultants for these movies. They would do a great deal of good for them.
As someone who grew up inspired by Turing - who was always a hero to me - The Imitation Game was simply heartbreaking. I can’t understand why filmmakers are so incapable of finding the drama in the incredible reality that they have to create such false narratives. As James said, Turing deserved so much better than this, yet we let him down AGAIN.
I feel bad for Tommy Flowers as he was a true genius and the real father of modern digital computers. Many of his advancements in the Colossus weren't rediscovered until way later and he build the whole thing with his own money leaving him pennyless after the war and almost all of his work was destroyed until someone went back and rebuilt it based on interviews and scant materials.
10:50 One thing I couldn't help notice about the Based On A True Story list that probably helps Imitation Game keep its title: no "Pearl Harbor" anywhere to be found. XD
18:33 Interesting choice of anthropomorphised name - Christopher. One of his boyhood friends, probably lover, was Christopher Strachey a very underrated computer scientist who was later professor at Oxford.
The film did allude to them briefly twice: 1) that they received the captured Enigma machine from the Polish intelligence service 2) when Turing first presents the idea for the cryptographic bombs, he says it's supposed to be an improved version of the machines built by Polish cryptographers
I think it was also a disservice to not talk about Tommy Flowers who actually designed and built Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic computer. Furthermore the fact it's 12 guys in a shed, whereas it was actually hundreds, even in the low thousands. Obviously the skipping over of the poles original cracking of engima before the rotor change is another disservice.
I’m just starting to watch this and should wait until I’ve finished but… Andrew Hodges’ book was excellent and although I understand that a film needs to compress things I found the creative liberties in the film absolutely inexcusable. We’re dealing with a man’s life and legacy here. I get so angry thinking about this film.
Wielkim niedopatrzeniem jest pominięcie polskiego udziału. To my złamaliśmy ten kod, a film poświęcił na to kilka sekund. Rozumiem, że film to fikcja, i dlatego trafia na śmietnik.
The real Alan Turing provided the mathematical foundations for computing by machine and first presented the concept of uncomputable functions. This completely overshadows in importance his work on code breaking.
Great collaboration! Alex seemed a bit nervous, but hopefully he'll be more comfortable with the next star! I liked the film, but agree mostly with the quality rating. In defense of the "pencils down at midnight", I actually think this did a good job informing the audience about the concept of "regenerating the keys". To do this in addition to explaining that stored information could be later decrypted is probably just too challenging for a layperson.
No mention of the great dilemma the film brought home - "now we know what is going to happen (to our convoys etc.), why we can't act on the immediate intelligence because the enemy will realize that we have broken their code system" - how can we leverage our intelligence?
0:25 What an amazing coincidence! While I always loved maths, that enigma machine video was what got me hooked and inspired me to pursue mathematics! Edit: I see that this was less of a coincidence than I realized! I commented this as soon as I heard that moment lol.
I read a biography on Alan Turing a long while back called "The Man Who Knew Too Much" and that was how I'd originally come to admire the man and his accomplishments and ideas. A decade or so later, when I finally got around to watching The Imitation Game, I felt like the film didn't do the life and achievements of Turing anywhere near as much justice as was deserved.
The film showed Turing having a paddy about some decrypted information that was relevant to a colleages brother because the nazis would realize enigma had been cracked... But there were other people at bletchley whos job it was to worry about that sort of thing - turing wasnt responsible for making that sort of decision, the film made it look like he was managing everything at bletchley. Theres a book called the ultra secret about the careful way the decrypted information had to be handled and used and iirc it doesn't mention Turing's name once - the guys deciding on the 'opsec' were in a different compartment.
i quite enjoyed it , but yea the affectations and stereotypes were a bit over the top . the worst offending trope to me is the singular "eureka" moment of using known parts of the message , which in the film is suddenly realized after talking in a bar . its such a terrible trope that downplays everyone's work , and how in real science its the contribution of thousands of incremental findings and important failures that lead to success . i did however like their twist on "the turing test" of humanity being about the moral dilemma of purposely NOT saving all the allies because it would have revealed that they had broken the code , that harsh acceptance of rationality to save more overall .
in the state theatre of Nürnberg, Germany there was a play about tourings life, his homosexuality, chemical castration and suicide. it did not fokus much on the math, but was really emotianal. can recomand it!
Have folks seen ‘Breaking The Code’, a made for TV movie based on the play of the same name, starring Sir Derek Jacobi as Alan Turing who had played the role on stage. I haven’t seen it since the 90s when it came out, but I recall enjoying it quite a bit.
It would be better for the public to have no notion of Turing at all, than for the public to have a false notion created by a careless entertainment product.
In terms of getting into a characters head without inventing phoney antagonists to argue with - its possible. There was a channel 4 series called undeclared war that did this with computer hackers. when they were hacking the would be shown in a sort of dream sequence climbing a mountain or solving some sort of other physical problem and feeling exhillarated when they got to the top only to see that there was another problem to solve... Or they'd just hit a dead end and had to backtrack. Seems to me that showing what it feels like for characters to be working on some challenging abstract problem in that sort of way is superior... Beautiful Mind was a bit like that too iirc even if it got a lot of stuff wrong.
This is nothing short of a brilliant dissection of the film and the story and so much around it! Alas, I haven't watched this so I'm prolly the wrong audience 👀
Just nitpicking: "Soviet Russia" and Soviet Union are not the same thing. "Soviet Russia" usually refers to Russian Soviet Federative Republic which existed 1917-1922 before it became a part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or Soviet Union.
You teased the part of the video I cared about at the beginning and then, at the end, said it was only available for patrons. Not very good form. Please be upfront Thank you for the video anyhow
A lot of the problems are common to all biographical films about famous academics. See A Beautiful Mind, or The Theory of Everything. These people are famous for being really, really smart and achieving great feats of intellectual advancement - but the subject in which they work isn't actually that exciting for most people, and any real attempt to explain it to the layman is going to take longer than the film. Everyone knows Oppenheimer did really good something-or-other, that doesn't mean they want to study quantum field theory and the mathematical prerequisites of calculus and linear algebra in order understand what exactly he achieved. So the writers have to dumb down the achievements and cram the explanation into a thirty-second segment and focus on more conventional character-driven stories. Real life doesn't always provide the stories that a hollywood movie needs though, with the obligatory roles of villain and love interest, so the account needs to be sexed-up to make it worthy of a movie. That's how you turn Alan Turing the mathematician who played a central role in the development of computability theory into 'Turing, Alan Turing' the master spy who single-handedly cracked the German codes, mastered the great game of espionage and won the war for the forces of good.
A huger oversight on your part is that you didn't talk about the title. The Imitation Game is the name Turing gave the "Turing Test" in his 1950 paper. The question he had is whether a machine could imitate a human. The conceit of the film is that Turing was a gay man trying to imitate a straight man, which is why they wanted to make him weird as well. They really wanted to play up the parallel of a machine fooling people into believing it is a human and Turing himself trying to fool others he was a normal heterosexual man. Much of his "weirdness" in the film is that he doesn't intuitively understand heterosexual relationships. To be sure, the film does a disservice to so many of these real people and doesn't mention the origin of the title, either.
the previous iteration that cracked early versions of enigma was from Polish cryptographers , most notably Rejewski , they called theirs "Bomba" , as in a literal cryptographic bomb . in 1939 they shared all their designs with british allies and was the foundation for Alan Turing's version "Bombe"
Thank you for your critique. I hated that movie. The movie did a massive disservice to a great man. Just an awful movie from every perspective. Just to add, Benedict Cumberbatch was also terrible, what a grossly inaccurate one dimensional portrayal.
I consider myself a bit of a Turing geek, but do not claim any scholarly authority. That said, "The Imitation Game" is the worst portrayal of Alan Turing I've ever encountered; actually the only inaccurate portrayal, and so grossly and wildly inaccurate as to be offensive, even laughable were it not that many people are going to watch this movie and believe the b.s. in it to be factual. So thank you Another Roof and Dr. Grimes for this video, helping to mend some of the damage to Turing's legacy that The Imitation Game inflicts on Turing and true history. Perhaps it cannot be said that one man and one man alone changed the course of history, but I shudder to think of how World War II would have played out if Alan Turing had not existed.
8:29 It’s alright to have a character act as an antagonistic force or resistance. But when you warp a real person to be that when they’re not, it’s just insulting. To everyone.
when have the movies done a good job unless you count movies about badly written works of fiction like "do androids dream of electric sheep" ---> "Blade Runner" in general the movies do dumb things to sabotage themselves
If you did horror films that are based on a true story, they're REALLY inaccurate. But that shouldn't be a surprise. The Warrens were terrible charletons and there's a ton of horror movies that start from the assumption that everything they said was true and then massively embellish from there.
Thank you. It took me two attempts to watch the film , it just made me angry . Hollywood's version of history, wrong as usual. Hope you make another video about "Oppenheimer"
______WAIT______ yes, you, the one reading comments, go like the video!!! the video doesnt have enough likes ok thanks, now you can go read the comments
12:40 I think the movie was trying to make a point here that if you declare some human behavior (e.g. homosexuality) illegal, you'll always get unwanted side-effects, too, such as inability to disclose a Russian spy. Did it happen in reality? Nope. Did that undermine the point movie was trying to made? Nope, again.
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Thank you for this! The strange detail in where Turing didn't know German was a really odd choice, since he corresponded with Gödel in German
It makes sense in the context of the narrative - which is 'oddball outsider runs contrary to all expectations and succeeds spectacularly through his unique perspective'.
Not speaking German made him the underdog and made for a funny exchange with the Commander (not to mention the audience can be sympathetic towards him more easily).
@@user-nt3mx7hz8u Except it really didn't achieve that at all, at least to me.
I ivite you people to listen to the recitaion of the Noble Quran ua-cam.com/video/IKZ57sdcFK4/v-deo.htmlsi=i8lD0MDkwVHgdQA3
@@user-nt3mx7hz8u But it's NOT EVEN TRUE AHHHHHHH
@@z-beeblebrox Hollywood caring more about spectacle than accuracy? Couldn't be.
I feel like the biggest problem with the way Alan Turing is portrayed in the movie is that he's portrayed with just offensively one dimensional autism spectrum trait stereotypes almost completely erasing his humanity and personality at times. Such a missed opportunity to portray a brilliant and quirky individual.
That's exactly what annoyed me. They effectively erased his actual character. He was a legitimately interesting man and I found it offensive that he was reduced to a stereotype. It felt lazy, like they didn't do any research.
Yeah, as an aspie myself I almost immediately noticed they were trying to make him aspie (which there's questionable evidence for in the first place), but ended up making him just an ass.
I think they felt they needed some driving conflict early in the movie. Else it's just a guy going to a job interview. The late-movie conflict was easy - his persecution for his sexuality. But for the beginning, they manufactured conflict by making their main character stereotypically insufferable against everyone around him.
What I would've do e, and there are traces of this in the movie, is went with the "this is no joking matter" approach, as in the enigma is the villain. I believe they went too dar in the direction of the general being an antagonistic fool. It would've been interesting to have a lighter cipher be cracked by Turing for an interview, or even as little as rattling off his achievements while also giving other candidates the spotlight.
Portraying coded autism as “this guy is just a jerk”. That almost never happens.
The worst disservice to Turing was having the framing device be him spilling national secrets to some random policeman who was interviewing him. Nobody involved ever told anybody at all until it was declassified in the 1970s. So the movie shows him committing treason, which carried a death penalty even after the war. About his time in Manchester, he was using a computer designed and built by other people because his own project, the Ace at NPL (National Physics Laboratory) was taking too long for his taste. After he left, the NPL team finished a reduced version named Pilot Ace and later a few machines followed the same style. But while the Manchester machine would look very familiar to us, the Turing design was very odd and ended up being a dead end in the evolution of computers.
As a German Turning has a special place in my life. My grandpa and his brother fought in WW2, were prisoners of war and both had scientific jobs. After the war one was living in West Germany and one East Germany. So a split family.
My father was an officer in the Bundeswehr (German Army) and he had a book called: Enigma by Robert Harris. I read it as a teenager and was fascinated by it. This is one reason I chose a very specific career path.
After school I also joined the Bundeswehr and became an officer myself. I got a diploma in computer science and dug into cryptography. We had one trimester of number theory and cryptography and worked also through the inner workings of the Enigma.
After 12 years I left the Bundeswehr and now I am working in the field of information security.
I can say: We need strong cryptography, a strong and peaceful Europe, and we need to share with all people around the globe.
I talked to hackers from over 20 countries and it's everywhere the same story. History must not repeat itself.
Thank you for this great video!
8:10 - this reminds me of Sully where for similar reason they portrayed NTSB as villains where in reality they were absolutely on the crew’s side in their finding. I contrast it with The Martian which demonstrated that you can have a good film without a conscious antagonist. But I guess some film makers are stuck with thinking that ‘man vs man’ is the only possible source of tension in a story.
@@mina86 Ahh yes The Martian is a good example!
All Hollywood biopic type films are like this. ___ was down on his/her luck but he/she's determined to ____ no matter what those snobs in _____ think or even their best friend! Despite constant doubt they finally did it alone! Also there's a love interest.
Apollo 13 was another one. In the movie, Swigert (Bacon) is shown as having somewhat questionable ability, and there is tension with the rest of the crew. In reality, he was extremely competent and Lovell and Haise had complete confidence in him.
I'm personally sick to bloody death of man vs man conflict in stories. Even Man vs Himself/His "inner demons" is overdone. I'd love to see more movies where the source of conflict is something else entirely - the weather or a tricky puzzle or a broken piece of essential equipment and an incomplete toolkit! Anything that has serious stakes and the potential to make life harder for the protagonists but have the people actually *_get along_* and _help_ each other for once.
"Sitting at a desk for _dozens_ of hours every day"? Assuming that's not every hour of every day, I'm impressed that you found a way to cram more than the standard 2 dozen hours into a day! 😉
My desk moves at relativistic speeds...
@@AnotherRoofwouldn't that contract your time, making it so the desk experiences even fewer than two dozen hours per day? I might be wrong and in need of a refresher on relativity theory, though.
Did you also win future and past chess tournaments, twice, using such a desk?
@daanwilmer when one rule is broken, why not one more?
I ivite you people to listen to the recitaion of the Noble Quran ua-cam.com/video/IKZ57sdcFK4/v-deo.htmlsi=i8lD0MDkwVHgdQA3
my favorite part of the movie is when Allen Turing said "it's turing time" and ture all over them, it really makes me feels like a turing machine
My pet peeve was that during the ending they say something like "today we call Turing machines computers". Like, no, that's not true at all. The concept of Turing machines (and also Turing completeness etc.) has a specific meaning, it's not a synonym for computer and it's still used in computer science today. I think this actually does a big disservice to Turing, because when people learn what the Turing machine actually is, they will think "ok so the film was full of BS, I guess they tried to inflate Turing's contribution to computing while the only thing he did was some mathematical concept".
I think some math correspondent was enthusiastically sharing how Turing machines are "equivalent" to general purpose computers in their expressive power to recognize the same class of languages modern computers can recognize, but this got jumbled up by a lot of movie people until it reached the writers where they said what they said about "Today we call Turing machines computers".
It is absolutely a synonym for computer. The general purpose computer only differs from a Turing machine in that it has a finite memory, that's all. A Turing machine is an idealized general purpose computer with a potentially infinite store of memory, so it never runs out. That's the mathematical definition.
Why would you make this comment? It is ridiculous, you speak as if you understand the concepts, and if you actually understood them, you would know that "Turing machine" is a synonym for "computer", while "Turing completeness" means "can be used as a general purpose computer".
@@annaclarafenyo8185 Technically a Turing machine is a particular model of computation. It is useful for modelling the concept of computability. If you are interested in finer questions regarding computational complexity there are some subtleties. If you want talk about linear time computation then there is a distinction between single-tape and multi-tape turing machines, for example.
A Turing machine is a theoretical model for reasoning about computability. A computer (nowadays) is a physical object that computes things. They're not unrelated, but one is not an instance of the other. You wouldn't call some other Church-Turing equivalent model of computation like the iota combinator a computer, or call a computer an iota combinator.
I found the film so grating because what I knew/remembered was so much more interesting than the watered-down, time-displaced narrative in the film. like, the Poles demonstrated they could break Enigma, but what they couldn't do was afford to build lots of additional bombes for each permutation of cipher wheels
I was actually wanting to do a deep dive into how this movie did turing dirty for a long time now! I haven’t had a chance to watch just yet but excited to tonight!
a rare not david has been spotted in the wild!
I did really like 'The Imitation Game', though it was fairly obvious that it wasn't too historically accurate. I kind of put it in the same vein as "A Beautiful Mind," which embellishes (and outright retcons) history for the sake of a narrative.
It's definitely possible to have both historical accuracy and a fulfilling narrative, but it's definitely hard.
I think "A Beautiful Mind", while not historically accurate, is more historically accurate than "The Imitation Game" but again I don't think just being historically inaccurate is a bad thing. It's the way in which they do it. The historical inaccuracies of "The Imitation Game" just make Turing seem like an asshole, his mathematician colleagues seem like idiots/haters, military people are made to seem like idiots, and it's just generally kind of cringe.
@@moatef1886 That said, British officers were as a rule fantastically thick-headed, chosen for upper-class heritage rather than ability.
I do like historical drama, but I almost feel like there should be a contractual obligation to also produce a documentary which clarifies which choices were made for dramatic purposes, and which are historically accurate. Often I’ll read a Wikipedia page after watching a movie like that, but that’s not ideal either.
I'm with you, it's not only deeply offensive but also just a bad film! It also bizarrely feels like offensive autism representation for a person we have zero evidence was autistic - like Cumberbatch or the film team saw he was a mathematician, just assumed autistic from that and then barely bothered to research autism
He did deserve better. They even reused that entirely fictitious bar>girls>insight-to-his-problem scene straight from the John Nash biopic. Bullocks.
What offended me most is that, in reality, Poles did the heavy lifting. Brits built and operated the huge array of "bombes" invented by Poles and used at the beginning of the effort. Turing worked out Colossus to solve the tougher naval Enigma after they had been decrypting the simpler stuff for a long time. They also don't mention that the Friedmans in D.C. routinely decrypted hundreds of Enigma messages, mostly from agents in South America, without the help of bombes.
Little reported is that the Germans cracked all the ciphers used by the Allies. The Germans were unable to use the results because the various agencies within the German government who broke various ciphers didn't talk to one another or to the people who needed the decryptions, because they were jockeying for power.
Your second paragraph is just not true at all, for one D-days deception would have failed then and they would have beefed up Normandy, yet even after the allies had landed on the beach they thought the real attack would land in Calais. Germany didn't know they had machines to crack engima quicker than they could translate it themsleves. Secondly Italy was better at code breaking than Germany. Germany had a quite significant drop in information after Italy surrendered. Now if they solved ever cipher ever, why did that happen... Not to mention in the end the allies copied the Engima however changed it to not have the flaw of not repeating the letter and Germany didn't even know they'd done that. The irony that you were upset they spread misinformation and spread your own is very ironic. Also Tommy Flowers deisgned and built Colossus.
Pardon me for speaking like a mathematician, but that’s my gig. I was an Army cryptanalyst and I’m now a math & science teacher.
Historical fiction (HF) as a genre spans a vast literary and historical space. To the degree that it touches on real people or comes close to significant events, it moves toward factual revisionism, urban mythology, propaganda and all manner of apocryphal narrative sourcing. It’s just profoundly irresponsible to creatively embellish true and important history with what are known falsehoods. This contrasts sharply with guessing and filling in the blanks as even the best scholars are inclined to do. When we inject intentional errors into the minds of audiences who believe what they are seeing to be framed in mostly true history, we distort popular notions of reality. The higher order implications include increased social and philosophical controversy for no reason other than theatrics. Therefore, we should be especially careful tolerating dramatic embellishments where evidence or factuality matter. This also applies to current events. No amount of entertainment will ever ethically or morally justify the intentional dumbing down of society. It is fundamentally a vile practice and it should always be rejected.
I agree with you. As I watch a movie, I don't take anything for granted.
For example I don't think John Nash thought of his "Nash equilibrium" while he was at a bar with his 3 buddies looking at a group of 4 women one of which was hotter than the others. A Beautiful Mind didn't mislead me into thinking that was the case.
But I was amazed at how many details from The Imitation Game were just plain false.
Like with the Soviet spy. I know nothing can be taken for granted but for sure if they put that in the movie, there must have been something between Turing and a Soviet spy.
The thing with the bell at midnight: I was kind of shocked to hear that there was nothing even close to that in the real story. Of course you can't trust movies but surely they put that in there because at midnight everyone had to stop working yesterday's codes and start working on the next day's codes. Maybe there's just no bell, maybe it's just the supervisor that comes in the room and tells everybody to move on to the next day's codes. And now I hear it's just "nope, we invented that part oopsie".
While Turing was definitely ahead of his time in his thoughts about thinking machines, I think it's important to note that he was far from the first to do so. Ada Lovelace, at the end of her seminal paper in which she described the first computer program for Babbage's Difference Engine, had a whole section of then-fanciful speculation about what such computing devices could one day do: compose music, discover mathematical proofs, etc. Creative endeavors often thought of as uniquely human, she understood could be performed with enough calculation... and now we have AI that does all the things she imagined.
I don't know whether Lovelace was the first to think about such things in such contexts, but she was certainly prescient about it at a level of understanding most people weren't until the 1950s at best.
(Sorry, I know this is a Turing video; but I'm a big fan of Lovelace, so I had to mention that 😅)
With all respect to Lovelace, I think the first person who described a program for Babbage's computing device was clearly Babbage himself.
@@cube2fox Not as far as I'm aware. He built the machine, but hadn't actually written any programs for it. He collaborated with Lovelace to help him figure that part out.
@@IceMetalPunk This is like claiming that the various inventors of calculators didn't ever use it to calculate anything, or that the inventors of early computers like Z3 or ENIAC didn't themselves ever come up with any programs for it. Or like saying the inventors of the C programming language never wrote any C programs, etc. Which would all be _completely_ ridiculous.
@@cube2fox What? How is it like that at all? Babbage and Lovelace worked together on the development of the Difference Engine. It was a collaboration. When Lovelace wrote the paper detailing the algorithmic implementation, Babbage wasn't even finished building the machine yet. I never said Babbage never programmed it, I said Lovelace wrote the *first* program for it.
@@IceMetalPunk I think Lovelace didn't work on Babbage's computer. Never heard of such a claim.
As someone who has looked up to Turing since I was a child this film was such a terrible disappointment. It seems so sad to me that they didn't take the opportunity to tell the real story of this amazing man and how terribly he was betrayed by his country. Instead they chose to make a cliché that is so much less interesting than the true story.
At the risk of voicing an unpopular opinion here, I think the reason why they portrayed Turing the way the did in the film is pretty obvious - the actor.
Benedict Cumberbatch always plays some small variation on the same character in essentially every single movie/drama he's cast in: some kind of brilliant/maverick genius, that is very much aware of his superior intellect/power and has to display it at every opportunity.
(Clearly), some people find this kind of character very entertaining and believable - I personally do not. But it is what it is and I suspect the portrayal in the Imitation Game likely had a lot to do with this.
Apparently Freeman Dyson, who knew Turing, called the film "The Irritation Game."
23:04 And they should of [asked me about the script], cuz I would have _GONE through that script,_ *big breath **_immediate cut_*
Mentioning other early visionaries, in 1922 a guy named Lewis Fry Richardson published a plan to do weather forecasting using massive multi-core parallelized computing. Of course, he was talking about human computers, but speculating on the important aspect of how even with fast computers, for large problems, the limitations quickly become message passing.
How the heck does James never age???
As you noted, it's fascinating how Turing was able to foresee so much of the subsequent technological development. He was thinking about issues that were still a century away!
What really blows my mind is that he worked this all out on a PURELY THEORETICAL level! He was NOT a "computer scientist" (or a scientist of any kind). He was a mathematician and logician. His only experiments were "thought experiments".
So with nothing more than (at most) a pencil and pepper, he predicted the inevitable rise of artificial intelligence at a time when only 1 in 10 people owned a telephone. Let that sink in.
AND he helped defeat the Nazis.
And then the British government forced him to undergo chemical castration, which caused him to commit suicide.
That's why I'm an anarchist. Power is always disgusting. But I digress...
Rest in peace, Mr. Turing. You deserved so much better. 😔
Hollywood has always had a bad habit of ALWAYS presenting smart people, a.k.a. "nerds", as being, on one hand clumsy autistic cartoonish virgins, and on the other hand extreme antisocial self-entitled assholes. Have your cake and eat it too why don't you.
It clearly shows how these writters / producers can be so detached from the reality of being smart in real-life that they end-up imagining cartoonish characters who fortunately are not at all like that in real life. I mean c'mon.
That is the reason why I deeply hate and despise shows like "The Big Bang Theory" or "Sherlock", the latter apparently being the acting template that Cumberbatch pulls out of his sleeve every time he has to play a smart person borderlining on genius.
Not only they misrapresent intelligence but they apparently don't understand eccentrism and introvertion either.
I mean, ok I get it when you have fantasy characters, but how could they not get it right in regards to real people such as for example John Nash in "The Beautiful Mind" or Alan Turing in "The Imitation Game", and fail to such a degree?
[Ok granted, Rusell Crowe did a better job as he at least tried to be more delicate, more reserved in his portrayal of Nash. He did not dial "nerdness" up to 5000 and make a parody of it. In overall he did a better job in his acting, he was mostly limited by the poor writting].
And as for Turing, it's a shame because he was a promising individual who was just at the beginning of his discoveries and who knows how much deeper he could've impacted for the better the world in which we live and take for granted. They did not do him any favors in life and they are not doing to him any after death and I do not like the fact that Benedict Cumberbatch seems so pleased and proud with his portrayal of Turing.
The truth is that the writers and producers aren't detached from reality. In fact, they're so connected to reality that they know what the vast majority of the public want to see, and they make money doing it.
I fail to see what's the issue with Cumberbatch's Holmes in the show
Actually, the purpose is probably more to project the archetype of the "asshole smart person" in everyone's psyche.
The writters do it for their own reasons, as detached and antisocial as they themselves are, but the financing behind that repetitive archetype's presence in Hollywood movies comes from another goals : Make people suffer, so they consume to cope.
It also project the archetypenon a lot of smart people who actually think "that's how intelligent people should behave".
Not every high IQ individual took the time to make their EQ as strong.
Tldr : It's basically a huge trap in the culture.
Hollywood has the same issue with its depiction of atheists. Either you get the assholes like Dr. House, or the "detached from emotions and pop culture" like Dr. Temperance Brennan. But that is an overlap of the problem you mention: fiction often portrays an unrealistic separation between emotions and intelligence. The smarter a character is, the more aloof and detached from society they are; and vice-versa, there's often an "emotional savior" character that tries to "help them connect" with their Normal Intelligence EQ Abilities™ (Wilson in House, Booth in Bones, etc.)
As much as I loved Fringe, they *really* dug into that terrible trope towards the end with the Observers, revealing (spoiler alert for a years-old show) that they "made themselves so smart, they lost their emotional connections". And don't get me started on the stereotypes of *every main character* in The Big Bang Theory. (Oh, yeah, they have the "emotional savior" character, too, in Penny!)
I think it's a pretty damaging trope, to be honest: it makes people distrust intelligence and actively *want* to avoid learning, for fear they'll become just as detached or douchey. It makes people think they have to choose between emotions or intelligence -- and who would ever want to be smart if it means they can't love? We definitely need more human portrayals of smart character in popular media.
Honestly, one of my favorite Smart Person characters was Toby Curtis in the show "Scorpion"... which is sad, because that show had *terrible* writing overall 😂But he was at least human and not just a stereotype, while also being intelligent and an expert in his field.
@@3Max "they know what the vast majority of the public want to see" Some highly marketed movies that ended up being huge flops tend to disprove this. And so do some other movies ending up being huge successes through spectator's recommendations despite the producers making no efforts at all because they didn't believe in them. Major Hollywood producers know above all the unofficial rulebook which indicates that all movies must include a well known set of stereotypical scenes even if half of them make absolutely no sense in the context of the story the movie is trying to tell. They are ready to ruin a nice and consistent scenario and script just so they have their complete list of pet peeve scenes.
The point in this video about creating an antagonist with Commander Denniston is one of those examples. They insult that officer's memory by portraying him as a petty bureaucrat who understands nothing at maths while he was in reality a codebreaker himself with great knowledge of state of the art cryptology. the only reason for that is they wanted their "antagonist chief that represents incompetent petty hierarchy that slows down the genius efforts always asking for immediate results while the genius is working on something bigger". This is a deviation of our post-industrial society where money is the alpha and omega of everything. This wasn't the case during WWII. Truth is their hierarchy was fully aware of the importance of all this and did everything financially and physically to ensure the cryptology team had everything they needed. Of course they kept track of payments in accounting books. That doesn't mean they contested every single demand.
The joke that "they got that his name was Alan" is doubly funny to me since the audio description for the film says "based on the book by Alan Hodges". The book is by Andrew Hodges. Anyway, best part of TIG is by far the soundtrack, which I still listen to.
does james grime age or does he just stay in his mid 20s forever
Not forever. Probably to so me time in his mid 50s when one day, without any obvious changes, he will suddenly look a spry 70, which will then be his appearance until he dies at the age of 127.
Oh wow very excited to see this. Is it your first collab? I discovered you first when you did that Fermat Descartes video, so really looking forward to more maths history
Last November I did one with Tom Rocks Maths, and I have another maths history video in the pipeline!
Hidden Figures or Marguerite's Theorem next? Props to EVA Air for having two films ostensibly about mathematics in their in-flight entertainment! Watched them back to back on the way back from Taiwan, keen to hear your take on either :)
It is yet to come a good Mathematician's movie with proper Math consultants.
I mean, for the Queen's Gambit they were able to get Garry Kasparov as a consultant...
I would love to see Math influencers being invited as consultants for these movies. They would do a great deal of good for them.
@@NoisqueVoaProduction x+y is pretty good!
As someone who grew up inspired by Turing - who was always a hero to me - The Imitation Game was simply heartbreaking. I can’t understand why filmmakers are so incapable of finding the drama in the incredible reality that they have to create such false narratives.
As James said, Turing deserved so much better than this, yet we let him down AGAIN.
I feel bad for Tommy Flowers as he was a true genius and the real father of modern digital computers. Many of his advancements in the Colossus weren't rediscovered until way later and he build the whole thing with his own money leaving him pennyless after the war and almost all of his work was destroyed until someone went back and rebuilt it based on interviews and scant materials.
"The code book" by Simon Singh was my introduction to the workings of Enigma. I found it quite good!
10:50 One thing I couldn't help notice about the Based On A True Story list that probably helps Imitation Game keep its title: no "Pearl Harbor" anywhere to be found. XD
18:33 Interesting choice of anthropomorphised name - Christopher. One of his boyhood friends, probably lover, was Christopher Strachey a very underrated computer scientist who was later professor at Oxford.
4:41 "Sitting at a desk for dozens of hours every day." I hope that's only two dozen hours...
They didn't mention the contribution from Marian Rejewski and the other Polish codebreakers.
The film did allude to them briefly twice: 1) that they received the captured Enigma machine from the Polish intelligence service 2) when Turing first presents the idea for the cryptographic bombs, he says it's supposed to be an improved version of the machines built by Polish cryptographers
I think it was also a disservice to not talk about Tommy Flowers who actually designed and built Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic computer. Furthermore the fact it's 12 guys in a shed, whereas it was actually hundreds, even in the low thousands. Obviously the skipping over of the poles original cracking of engima before the rotor change is another disservice.
I’m just starting to watch this and should wait until I’ve finished but…
Andrew Hodges’ book was excellent and although I understand that a film needs to compress things I found the creative liberties in the film absolutely inexcusable. We’re dealing with a man’s life and legacy here. I get so angry thinking about this film.
Wielkim niedopatrzeniem jest pominięcie polskiego udziału. To my złamaliśmy ten kod, a film poświęcił na to kilka sekund. Rozumiem, że film to fikcja, i dlatego trafia na śmietnik.
The real Alan Turing provided the mathematical foundations for computing by machine and first presented the concept of uncomputable functions. This completely overshadows in importance his work on code breaking.
Great collaboration! Alex seemed a bit nervous, but hopefully he'll be more comfortable with the next star! I liked the film, but agree mostly with the quality rating. In defense of the "pencils down at midnight", I actually think this did a good job informing the audience about the concept of "regenerating the keys". To do this in addition to explaining that stored information could be later decrypted is probably just too challenging for a layperson.
No mention of the great dilemma the film brought home - "now we know what is going to happen (to our convoys etc.), why we can't act on the immediate intelligence because the enemy will realize that we have broken their code system" - how can we leverage our intelligence?
0:25 What an amazing coincidence! While I always loved maths, that enigma machine video was what got me hooked and inspired me to pursue mathematics!
Edit: I see that this was less of a coincidence than I realized! I commented this as soon as I heard that moment lol.
I read a biography on Alan Turing a long while back called "The Man Who Knew Too Much" and that was how I'd originally come to admire the man and his accomplishments and ideas. A decade or so later, when I finally got around to watching The Imitation Game, I felt like the film didn't do the life and achievements of Turing anywhere near as much justice as was deserved.
James, great idea about Daniel Radcliffe. I think you're right, he could have been great.
They shouldve just let Dr. Grime play Turing
Clearly the movie is inaccurate. Thanks for that info. Considering Turings importance to UK culture, what are Cumberbatch’s feelings on his portrayal?
10:34 that’s cool! (I mean the study as a whole)
The film showed Turing having a paddy about some decrypted information that was relevant to a colleages brother because the nazis would realize enigma had been cracked... But there were other people at bletchley whos job it was to worry about that sort of thing - turing wasnt responsible for making that sort of decision, the film made it look like he was managing everything at bletchley.
Theres a book called the ultra secret about the careful way the decrypted information had to be handled and used and iirc it doesn't mention Turing's name once - the guys deciding on the 'opsec' were in a different compartment.
_The Imitation Game_ is such a character assassination imho, it's frustrating.
Sorry for not being on topic but you are a gem of a youtuber, massive respect
i quite enjoyed it , but yea the affectations and stereotypes were a bit over the top . the worst offending trope to me is the singular "eureka" moment of using known parts of the message , which in the film is suddenly realized after talking in a bar . its such a terrible trope that downplays everyone's work , and how in real science its the contribution of thousands of incremental findings and important failures that lead to success .
i did however like their twist on "the turing test" of humanity being about the moral dilemma of purposely NOT saving all the allies because it would have revealed that they had broken the code , that harsh acceptance of rationality to save more overall .
A wild singing banana appears!
in the state theatre of Nürnberg, Germany there was a play about tourings life, his homosexuality, chemical castration and suicide. it did not fokus much on the math, but was really emotianal. can recomand it!
Have folks seen ‘Breaking The Code’, a made for TV movie based on the play of the same name, starring Sir Derek Jacobi as Alan Turing who had played the role on stage. I haven’t seen it since the 90s when it came out, but I recall enjoying it quite a bit.
It would be better for the public to have no notion of Turing at all, than for the public to have a false notion created by a careless entertainment product.
In terms of getting into a characters head without inventing phoney antagonists to argue with - its possible. There was a channel 4 series called undeclared war that did this with computer hackers. when they were hacking the would be shown in a sort of dream sequence climbing a mountain or solving some sort of other physical problem and feeling exhillarated when they got to the top only to see that there was another problem to solve... Or they'd just hit a dead end and had to backtrack.
Seems to me that showing what it feels like for characters to be working on some challenging abstract problem in that sort of way is superior... Beautiful Mind was a bit like that too iirc even if it got a lot of stuff wrong.
? I don't see any link to your sponsor anywhere on the video, nor in its description. Did you forget it?
Thank you for the video.
The duo we all needed🎉🎉
This is nothing short of a brilliant dissection of the film and the story and so much around it!
Alas, I haven't watched this so I'm prolly the wrong audience 👀
I agree with the verdict at the end: what a missed opportunity.
That Harry Potter actor as Alan Turing would have worked well also, I imagine.
Cheers!
Just nitpicking: "Soviet Russia" and Soviet Union are not the same thing. "Soviet Russia" usually refers to Russian Soviet Federative Republic which existed 1917-1922 before it became a part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or Soviet Union.
How did you not do an investigation in a video about turning? Seriously though I love your videos
I'm gunna be asleep during the James Grime premiere
Edit: I'm awake to see the James Grime non-premiere 🙂👍
Thanks agree with that analysis. Film made my toes curl for so many reasons.
Cover the Turing opera too! (I saw it - it could have been better)
There was also a play (at least one).
just realized your channel name is an Erdos reference
You teased the part of the video I cared about at the beginning and then, at the end, said it was only available for patrons. Not very good form. Please be upfront
Thank you for the video anyhow
@@ericeaton3551 We'll be covering the navy enigma stuff in the next video that'll be available for everyone. Thanks for watching!
159 is consistent with at least 150.
Which are the 4 movies in the board at the Verdict? I can only recognize 'PI' and 'Cube'....
A Beautiful Mind (about John Nash) and X + Y (purely fictional; about a teenager selected for maths international olympiad).
At this point it might legitimately be worth it to try again.
A lot of the problems are common to all biographical films about famous academics. See A Beautiful Mind, or The Theory of Everything. These people are famous for being really, really smart and achieving great feats of intellectual advancement - but the subject in which they work isn't actually that exciting for most people, and any real attempt to explain it to the layman is going to take longer than the film. Everyone knows Oppenheimer did really good something-or-other, that doesn't mean they want to study quantum field theory and the mathematical prerequisites of calculus and linear algebra in order understand what exactly he achieved. So the writers have to dumb down the achievements and cram the explanation into a thirty-second segment and focus on more conventional character-driven stories. Real life doesn't always provide the stories that a hollywood movie needs though, with the obligatory roles of villain and love interest, so the account needs to be sexed-up to make it worthy of a movie. That's how you turn Alan Turing the mathematician who played a central role in the development of computability theory into 'Turing, Alan Turing' the master spy who single-handedly cracked the German codes, mastered the great game of espionage and won the war for the forces of good.
A huger oversight on your part is that you didn't talk about the title. The Imitation Game is the name Turing gave the "Turing Test" in his 1950 paper. The question he had is whether a machine could imitate a human.
The conceit of the film is that Turing was a gay man trying to imitate a straight man, which is why they wanted to make him weird as well. They really wanted to play up the parallel of a machine fooling people into believing it is a human and Turing himself trying to fool others he was a normal heterosexual man. Much of his "weirdness" in the film is that he doesn't intuitively understand heterosexual relationships.
To be sure, the film does a disservice to so many of these real people and doesn't mention the origin of the title, either.
Does anyone know what the outro music is?
I really liked the movie when I watched it. it's really sad to know how inaccurate it was
This was a treat
Funny. The german word "Bombe" (name of the enigma breaking machine apparently) translates "bomb" in english.
the previous iteration that cracked early versions of enigma was from Polish cryptographers , most notably Rejewski , they called theirs "Bomba" , as in a literal cryptographic bomb . in 1939 they shared all their designs with british allies and was the foundation for Alan Turing's version "Bombe"
@@zzzzzzz8473 language lessons in math class, what a vibe, i love it :D
It was very deliberate. Their clicking made people think of ticking bombs.
Thank you for your critique. I hated that movie. The movie did a massive disservice to a great man. Just an awful movie from every perspective. Just to add, Benedict Cumberbatch was also terrible, what a grossly inaccurate one dimensional portrayal.
I consider myself a bit of a Turing geek, but do not claim any scholarly authority. That said, "The Imitation Game" is the worst portrayal of Alan Turing I've ever encountered; actually the only inaccurate portrayal, and so grossly and wildly inaccurate as to be offensive, even laughable were it not that many people are going to watch this movie and believe the b.s. in it to be factual. So thank you Another Roof and Dr. Grimes for this video, helping to mend some of the damage to Turing's legacy that The Imitation Game inflicts on Turing and true history.
Perhaps it cannot be said that one man and one man alone changed the course of history, but I shudder to think of how World War II would have played out if Alan Turing had not existed.
Enigma was my first numerphile vid 😊
8:29 It’s alright to have a character act as an antagonistic force or resistance. But when you warp a real person to be that when they’re not, it’s just insulting. To everyone.
Nice!
when have the movies done a good job unless you count movies about badly written works of fiction like "do androids dream of electric sheep" ---> "Blade Runner" in general the movies do dumb things to sabotage themselves
This WILL be good!!!
Why no link to the guest in the description?
Did I miss it?
@@JeremyHelm Yeah the link is to the numberphile Enigma video
If you did horror films that are based on a true story, they're REALLY inaccurate. But that shouldn't be a surprise. The Warrens were terrible charletons and there's a ton of horror movies that start from the assumption that everything they said was true and then massively embellish from there.
Publish the mc enigma machine video.
Awesome chat. Great to see James, who looks rather dapper in his waistcoat. Looking forward to part 2
Looking forward to this! I was enormously disappointed with the film.
Great Vid .
Thank you. It took me two attempts to watch the film , it just made me angry . Hollywood's version of history, wrong as usual. Hope you make another video about "Oppenheimer"
Do Master and Commander next, it's fantastic
Edit: And I'm sure there's some geography math in there somewhere
im sorry you cant say that you built the engima machine in redstone and then gloss over it like its nothing interesting
______WAIT______
yes, you, the one reading comments, go like the video!!! the video doesnt have enough likes
ok thanks, now you can go read the comments
James grimes cameo let's go
12:40 I think the movie was trying to make a point here that if you declare some human behavior (e.g. homosexuality) illegal, you'll always get unwanted side-effects, too, such as inability to disclose a Russian spy. Did it happen in reality? Nope. Did that undermine the point movie was trying to made? Nope, again.
Singing Banana!
Station X was so much better from what I remember.