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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.
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!
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.
"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.
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".
@@PhilippeCarphin Yes, I wholeheartedly agree. I recently watched “Fly Me to the Moon,” and was left wondering how much is known, what’s legitimate speculation and where any legitimacy gives way to full blown creative license. These days so many people are willing to race across these lines who would have never dared just 10 years ago. Legitimate questions are belittled, people are destroyed and society is degraded in service to fictions. For example, I wonder if Kamala Harris isn’t being figuratively “prophetic” in what I see as her effort to induce political, social & cultural amnesia. She wants us to forget “what has been”-what makes America distinct and noteworthy-in favor of her feel good notions of joy and optimism. That effort falls flat with thiughtfull people as totally (probably intentionally) oblivious to the realities of unchecked immigration, including the associated fentanyl and violent crime crises. It also ignores the unprecedented inflation over which she and Joe Biden have presided. We are all necessarily burdened by our past, it shapes us and informs our present. To pretend otherwise at any level is to invite ruin. History is filled with examples of fallen societies unable to accept reality. America is too strong, too genuinely diverse and frankly too important to be destroyed through such mass delusions.
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.
@@wolf1066not sure what you do, or where at, I’m in security, software, other humans, be they internal politics or external threat actors, are my no 1 antagonist in the movie that is “My Life”. Though I do agree in principle, that they’ve made a tiresome trope out of it, some originality would be a pleasant change. A good adversary in this case could have been the computer itself, lord knows I feel like they are daily. The “I can see the answer but our technology hasn’t evolved enough to bring it to life” type of thing perhaps.
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
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Polish Bomba only worked up to 1940, after which the Germans made changes to Enigma's procedures which largely ended the Polish versions ability to decrypt traffic. Turing designed a largely *new* version, the Bombe which was both much faster and worked with the German's more secure procedures. (Including the naval Enigma). Elizabeth Friedman broke the earliest versions of Enigma version by hand - so did the Polish, before they invented the bomba to greatly speed up the process. Colosuss had nothing to do with any version of Enigma, and Turing didn't work on it at all. Colossus was designed by a team lead by Bill Tutte for the purpose of breaking the *Lorenz* cipher used by high command. As far as is known, there are several Allied ciphers that the Germans never cracked, SIGABA is one of them. Seriously, you're about as accurate as The Imitation Game.
@@RedwoodRhiadra With the new naval enigma the US "designed a largely new version, the Bombe which was both much faster and worked with the German's more secure procedures." For naval Enigma the UK used outsourced Bombe
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.
My father told me that his mother who was a very quiet woman would occasionally say things like "that's not right" when they were watching a war movie. Her husband would say "what are you talking about, I was there!" and it would just be sort of whatever you say dear. Much later we found out what she did during the war... at McArthur's headquarters.
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 :)
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.
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
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 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.
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. 😔
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 .
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
For me the worst part of the movie was where the woman tells him that her counterpart always starts the same thing and somehow that was eureka moment. Lady the message is encrypted and text that you see shall be different everyday. That's how that machine worked. They figured out eventually that things in start repeat but that was not because everyday some woman saw same text.
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.
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.
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 👀
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.
As an American who is less aware of Alan Turing. To my limited understanding movie did get a lot of the important details right. Turing made the bombe machine to crack the enigma machine. Which in it's self was helped by the Nazi's using "H*il H*tler." Then the tragedy of Turing being chemically castrated for being gay. And then then his suicide due to chemical castration. And the post humorous knighting of Turing are all very important details they shouldn't mess up. Outside of British mathematics Turing has a reputation of being peculiar. The story of Turing's mug chained to the radiator didn't help. And let's be honest here we all know someone who's incredibly smart but they do things differently for some reason. So as an American the inaccuracies don't bother me that much because it's not well known enough. The movie that did piss me off about inaccuracies is "Radioactive." Multiple Nobel prize scientist Marie Curie. They made her out to be a lost, grief stricken, window. While these were technically true she basically worked until the radiation poisoning killed her. Maybe it's the part of me that wanted to be a scientist but you don't disrespect the person who started a new branch of chemistry that would go on to save lives through x rays and chemo therapy. I think I'm less mad about Turing's inaccuracies because there are so many British mathematicians who know better that are willing to fight tooth and nail for Turing.
What I can't forgive is how the text at the ending reduces Turing machines to "today we call them computers". NO! A Turing machine is a purely mathematical construction and model of what is computable. A physical computer is merely a very large finite state machine. It would have absolutely no bearing on the story to get that text somewhere in the vicinity of the truth.
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.
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
For all its historical inaccuracies, it was only the wrong portrayal of Denniston that really annoyed me. The movie would have been so much better if the actual history was applied to him.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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).
@@Thomas-f6y5t 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 ruclips.net/video/IKZ57sdcFK4/видео.htmlsi=i8lD0MDkwVHgdQA3
@@Thomas-f6y5t 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.
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!
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.
"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 ruclips.net/video/IKZ57sdcFK4/видео.htmlsi=i8lD0MDkwVHgdQA3
He did deserve better. They even reused that entirely fictitious bar>girls>insight-to-his-problem scene straight from the John Nash biopic. Bullocks.
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
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".
@@PhilippeCarphin Yes, I wholeheartedly agree. I recently watched “Fly Me to the Moon,” and was left wondering how much is known, what’s legitimate speculation and where any legitimacy gives way to full blown creative license. These days so many people are willing to race across these lines who would have never dared just 10 years ago. Legitimate questions are belittled, people are destroyed and society is degraded in service to fictions.
For example, I wonder if Kamala Harris isn’t being figuratively “prophetic” in what I see as her effort to induce political, social & cultural amnesia. She wants us to forget “what has been”-what makes America distinct and noteworthy-in favor of her feel good notions of joy and optimism. That effort falls flat with thiughtfull people as totally (probably intentionally) oblivious to the realities of unchecked immigration, including the associated fentanyl and violent crime crises. It also ignores the unprecedented inflation over which she and Joe Biden have presided. We are all necessarily burdened by our past, it shapes us and informs our present. To pretend otherwise at any level is to invite ruin. History is filled with examples of fallen societies unable to accept reality. America is too strong, too genuinely diverse and frankly too important to be destroyed through such mass delusions.
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.
@@wolf1066not sure what you do, or where at, I’m in security, software, other humans, be they internal politics or external threat actors, are my no 1 antagonist in the movie that is “My Life”. Though I do agree in principle, that they’ve made a tiresome trope out of it, some originality would be a pleasant change.
A good adversary in this case could have been the computer itself, lord knows I feel like they are daily. The “I can see the answer but our technology hasn’t evolved enough to bring it to life” type of thing perhaps.
Apparently Freeman Dyson, who knew Turing, called the film "The Irritation Game."
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
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.
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.
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.
23:04 And they should of [asked me about the script], cuz I would have _GONE through that script,_ *big breath **_immediate cut_*
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!
"The code book" by Simon Singh was my introduction to the workings of Enigma. I found it quite good!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Polish Bomba only worked up to 1940, after which the Germans made changes to Enigma's procedures which largely ended the Polish versions ability to decrypt traffic. Turing designed a largely *new* version, the Bombe which was both much faster and worked with the German's more secure procedures. (Including the naval Enigma).
Elizabeth Friedman broke the earliest versions of Enigma version by hand - so did the Polish, before they invented the bomba to greatly speed up the process.
Colosuss had nothing to do with any version of Enigma, and Turing didn't work on it at all. Colossus was designed by a team lead by Bill Tutte for the purpose of breaking the *Lorenz* cipher used by high command.
As far as is known, there are several Allied ciphers that the Germans never cracked, SIGABA is one of them.
Seriously, you're about as accurate as The Imitation Game.
@@RedwoodRhiadra With the new naval enigma the US "designed a largely new version, the Bombe which was both much faster and worked with the German's more secure procedures." For naval Enigma the UK used outsourced Bombe
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.
My father told me that his mother who was a very quiet woman would occasionally say things like "that's not right" when they were watching a war movie. Her husband would say "what are you talking about, I was there!" and it would just be sort of whatever you say dear. Much later we found out what she did during the war... at McArthur's headquarters.
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!
0:39 Certainly beats having your signature video be The Parker Square!
A wild singing banana appears!
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 :)
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.
Yoooooo, it's James Grimeeeeee!
How the heck does James never age???
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
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.
Great video!
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.
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. 😔
Question: what do you make of the earlier film of "Enigma", based on the book by Robert Harris?
I have read a biography of Turning written by his mother. Don’t remember title but it is definitely work a read.
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.
Chris is the spirit of his close friend Christopher Morcom, Alan talks about him in his 1932 essay "Nature of Spirit"
I'd like to see a video talking about the accuracy of the movie enigma with Dougray Scott.
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!
4:41 "Sitting at a desk for dozens of hours every day." I hope that's only two dozen hours...
They shouldve just let Dr. Grime play Turing
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?
_The Imitation Game_ is such a character assassination imho, it's frustrating.
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.
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.
Oi lads! That singing banana's back on the telly!! 🤠 🎶 🍌
I'm gunna be asleep during the James Grime premiere
Edit: I'm awake to see the James Grime non-premiere 🙂👍
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.
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 .
Does anyone know what the outro music is?
Thank you for the video.
1:09 i forgot about the army one! I always just remember the Navy one...
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
Please talk about the purple code next!!! :)
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).
James, great idea about Daniel Radcliffe. I think you're right, he could have been great.
You have to do Oppenheimer next :P
For me the worst part of the movie was where the woman tells him that her counterpart always starts the same thing and somehow that was eureka moment.
Lady the message is encrypted and text that you see shall be different everyday. That's how that machine worked.
They figured out eventually that things in start repeat but that was not because everyday some woman saw same text.
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.
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!
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.
? I don't see any link to your sponsor anywhere on the video, nor in its description. Did you forget it?
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.
just realized your channel name is an Erdos reference
Sorry for not being on topic but you are a gem of a youtuber, massive respect
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 👀
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.
Clearly the movie is inaccurate. Thanks for that info. Considering Turings importance to UK culture, what are Cumberbatch’s feelings on his portrayal?
As an American who is less aware of Alan Turing. To my limited understanding movie did get a lot of the important details right. Turing made the bombe machine to crack the enigma machine. Which in it's self was helped by the Nazi's using "H*il H*tler." Then the tragedy of Turing being chemically castrated for being gay. And then then his suicide due to chemical castration. And the post humorous knighting of Turing are all very important details they shouldn't mess up. Outside of British mathematics Turing has a reputation of being peculiar. The story of Turing's mug chained to the radiator didn't help. And let's be honest here we all know someone who's incredibly smart but they do things differently for some reason. So as an American the inaccuracies don't bother me that much because it's not well known enough.
The movie that did piss me off about inaccuracies is "Radioactive." Multiple Nobel prize scientist Marie Curie. They made her out to be a lost, grief stricken, window. While these were technically true she basically worked until the radiation poisoning killed her. Maybe it's the part of me that wanted to be a scientist but you don't disrespect the person who started a new branch of chemistry that would go on to save lives through x rays and chemo therapy. I think I'm less mad about Turing's inaccuracies because there are so many British mathematicians who know better that are willing to fight tooth and nail for Turing.
Yay James Grime!
Mr. Grimes lookin' SHARP! ☺
What I can't forgive is how the text at the ending reduces Turing machines to "today we call them computers". NO!
A Turing machine is a purely mathematical construction and model of what is computable. A physical computer is merely a very large finite state machine.
It would have absolutely no bearing on the story to get that text somewhere in the vicinity of the truth.
I also question why the contributions of the Polish intelligence cryptography department - they figured out the basics and produced the first _bomba_
The British Bombe (and its Polish predecessors) were computers. These were not universal computers, which one can consider as fully programmable.
Maybe you both could do a documentary about it all with 100% truths?? I’d watch it!
How did you not do an investigation in a video about turning? Seriously though I love your videos
Why no link to the guest in the description?
Did I miss it?
@@JeremyHelm Yeah the link is to the numberphile Enigma video
I have seen 3 films about Alan Turing 1 was a BBC documentary i believe
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.
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!
For all its historical inaccuracies, it was only the wrong portrayal of Denniston that really annoyed me. The movie would have been so much better if the actual history was applied to him.
Why is it 'Machine Learning' and not 'Machine Teaching'?! 🤔
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.
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.
Yeah I agree, why is their leader the antagonist? Surely _the war_ and _the germans_ if not _the code_ are the antagonist?
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.
Cover the Turing opera too! (I saw it - it could have been better)
There was also a play (at least one).
At this point it might legitimately be worth it to try again.
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.
The book has tons of BS to begin with.
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.
Great Vid .