Posted on 11/20/2014 4:00:14 PM PST by the scotsman
'It is the height of the Second World War. A group of codebreakers stands in a dimly lit warehouse 50 miles northwest of London, a giant machine composed of spinning drums and wires looms in front of them.
It's taken years of work -- as well as a few shouting matches -- to get the device assembled and ready to start sorting through 159 quintillion combinations in search of the one that will let the British crack the Germans' infamous Enigma machine. The switch is flipped and nine rows of drums begin spinning as the assembled group waits... and waits. It takes a while to go through each combination, and staring at the device has all the excitement of watching laundry spin in a dryer. Frustration quickly sets in and tensions mount, because for the team in The Imitation Game, guns and tanks are not the weapons they fear. Their enemy is time.
The Imitation Game is a new film based on the life of legendary computer scientist Alan Turing, played here by Benedict Cumberbatch.'
(Excerpt) Read more at engadget.com ...
I can't wait and I think Cumberbatch would be right for the part.
That’ll be the first adult movie I’ve seen in years. Years ago, Derek Jacobi played Turing in a play produced in NYC. It was very good as well.
Keep it and use it well. Hand it down.
My grandkids like to divy up my books when they come over (and dammit, I'm still alive).
/johnny
Thanks for the recommendation. I visited Bletchley Park while on a trip overseas in 2007.
yeah. He finally got caught for preying on underaged lower class boys. But will they spin it so that it was merely normal homosexual conduct and pretend he was a martyr?. Only people preaching morality will get nabbed for sexual abuse in today's world.
So my questions are: Is the film about the codebreakers? And if so, is Turing really the hero, or were others just as vital to the effort? And my third question: is it being spun as pro gay propaganda?
England has also released a movie about the invention of Radar."Castles in the Sky" which was pretty good.
Yes, it is. Turing isn’t the only codebreaker in the film.
Yes, he was, as were the others.
No, the film deals mostly with the codebreaking.
As to Turing’s homosexuality, he had consentual sex with young men, none underage. You can dislike a practice yet find the-then punishment for it completely out of proportion. To jail men for their sexual orientation was and is ridiculous.
Ironic you say England, as radar was invented by a Scotsman. Robert Watson-Watt.
Yes.
I agree about how the Polish have been marginalised. I will say that British TV and radio and media has covered the Poles more and more in the 21st C, there have been programmes on TV about the Poles in the RAF, the Polish ground forces.....not enough, but a start.
Yes, I have, which is why I am recommending it.
A proper old fashioned, well written, well acted film.
My aunt married one of those polish fighter pilots in the UK. Seemed like a nice guy, tho she divorced him later.
The intro has film clips of the machine in operation.
(Available on Netflix)
I'm looking forward to seeing some decent movies this winter. Finally.
There was a fatal flaw in the Enigma machines.
They were set up to never encipher a character as itself.
i.e. Plaintext ‘A’ could never be encoded as ‘A’ ...this was a very, very stupid mistake.
This was the reason the Enigma was broken...this single flaw.
Enigma was basically a one-time-pad encryption scheme that had a badly flawed, mechanical random number generator.
The hard job was the cracking of the Lorenz machine (Tunny) It was a lot more sophisticated device than the relatively simple Enigma machine. Lorenz carried the traffic of the German high command.
The encryption method of both Tunny and Enigma was just a simple XOR operation...this is how a one-time-pad works...you XOR the plaintext against the random pad characters and doing another XOR at the receiving end turns it back to plaintext. The system is only as good as the randomness of the pad characters.
The Enigma radio traffic was sent as Morse code, the Tunny traffic was a type of radio teletype generated automatically by the machine...Tunny only required one operator whereas Enigma needed at least two to operate quickly.
I like your post.
IMO Turing is the true father of Computer Science.
His groundbreaking 1937 paper “On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem” was the first time anyone ever set out the workings of the modern stored-program computer. It seems simple now, but it was a brilliant insight.
It is the British who were at the forefront of Computer Science...first Turing, then the first working stored-program computer.. The Manchester Baby. Turing was in Manchester working on the Baby just after the war.
And today nearly all computers now operating in the world are of British design. The ARM processor...created by Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson. More ARM processors shipped last year than the population of the Earth.
The real history of Computer Science was shrouded in secrecy due to WW2. Many great men were denied their rightful place in that history because their work remained classified for many decades.
The Brits have a real knack for Computers....
Bandersnatch is a good actor. Might be worth watching.
Heroes of War Poland - Cracking Enigma.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dku-3huuqPA
But a guess a movie showing Poles cracking Enigma isn’t “Sexy” enough for Hollywood.
The main house at the Park was hosting a luncheon the day we were there, but it was open for us to go in and look around. The site is open for events and conferences year round. They offered guided tours of the Park, which took us around the various sections like the housing area, and gave historical info on the site. An elderly woman who had worked there during the war was on the tour and spoke to us about her time there. One of the things she said was that they had all been sworn to secrecy throughout their lifetimes. They were never to divulge anything about the place to anyone, and they took that oath seriously. Years later, when one of the men who worked there had written a book about his time there, she and the other Bletchley alumni felt betrayed.
They had one building that acted as a museum. It told the story of Bletchley, and displayed several different types of Enigma machines. One of the separate buildings housed the rebuild of the Colossus computer. Volunteers worked several years on it. None of the original parts were in existence as Churchill had ordered everything to be destroyed when the war ended.
One of the other buildings housed a collection of Churchill memorabilia. The elderly gentleman who watched over the room had collected most of the stuff himself. There was just about anything you could imagine with Churchill on it: bottle openers, napkins, lighters, glassware, etc. There was so much stuff that it would have taken you all day just to see everything. And the guy looked like Churchill, even down to the cigar he smoked.
We went to London in August, and it rained the whole 10 days we were there. And it poured at Bletchley. Thankfully we had brought our umbrellas. I had gone to London the year before, but in May, and the weather was awesome.
Good post.
Na zdrowie!
That reminds me that I need to get another coppy of applied cryptography. Hard to belive, but that one magically walked away from my office one day.
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