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 ...
If anyone hasn’t seen or is pondering going to this film.
DO.
It is the new British film about Alan Turing, Bletchley Park and the cracking of the Enigma code. Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Charles Dance, Matthew Goode, Rory Kinnear, Mark Strong.
It is a superb film, with terrific performances all round, a gripping story, great script.
I highly recommend it.
Any mention of the Polish Cryptographers that made the cracking of the Enigma Code possible?
Yes, albeit briefly.
Or just read Neal Stephenson’s The Cryptonomicon and be done with it.
It looks good. Benedict Cumberbatch is an excellent actor, I’ll have to check it out.
Things did not go well for Turing in the last years of life.
Is he the guy that came up with the Turing Test?
I cycle through my library on a decadal basis. Lots of books go away every time. The books before 1900 always stay. The art books stay. The how-to books stay, along with the 1962 Encyclopedia Britannica (The WHOLE thing).
And a dog-eared, paperback copy of the Cryptonomicon.
Go figure.
/johnny
Didn’t the British capture an enigma machine from a German Weather reporting ship in the North Atlantic?
Mostly, they don't for homosexuals. Funny how that happens.
/johnny
The Oscar race for Best Picture will be a toss-up: civil rights march vs. closeted civil servant vs. white, hetero guy who kills people from long distance.
...vs. white, hetero long distance runner and WWII POW.
I think they used the regular, brief, encrypted reports as a sort of Rosetta Stone, since they knew or could easily guess the plain text of them. They could scarcely believe that the Germans made such a blunder, but that’s how confident they were in the Enigma.
I’ve heard “buzz” about Steve Carell and Michael Keaton.
Silly man, don't you know the contributions of Free Poland to Allied victory in the Second World War has been sent down the memory hole. Britain and France declared war on Germany ostensibly over German aggression on Poland. Nazi Germany's partner in aggression, the Soviet Union snapped up about half of Poland and then the US and the UK came to love Stalin and the USSR after Hitler sucker punched Stalin before he could be ready to execute a surprise attack on the Reich and forced Stalin to be an ally of ‘democracy’ in the good war . The Polish contribution to the cracking of the Enigma coding system is as ignored is the role of the Polish Air Force emigres who somehow made it to the UK and by the end of 1940 constituted (I believe I am right in this number. Those better informed please correct or affirm.) about 1/5 of the RAF Fighter Command squadrons. While there is a book every year or so and there have been several, generally bad or silly, films about the US staffed Eagle Squadrons, there is only one through treatment of the Poles in the Battle of Britain, ‘An Affair of Honor’. It is excellent but only appeared in the last decade. The combat record of the large Polish ground forces in campaigns in the Mediterranean and Western Europe have been relegated to even greater obscurity. Try and find a detailed operational narrative of the services of the Polish exile infantry or airborne forces let alone about the Polish Armored Division. This curtain of oblivion has been deliberately created since after starting the world war in defense of Polish territorial integrity Churchill and FDR were more than happy to sell out first the territorial borders of Poland at Yalta and then basically washed their hands of any responsibility for protecting the freedom and liberties of their brave and loyal allies against Soviet imposed slavery. Indeed both FDR and Churchill made it clear they found the non-communist Polish government to be tiresome pests always demanding they be treated as a loyal ally and not a disposal item to try and appease Stalin with. The blackout on the role of Poland and its forces in the war still continues mostly through successful inertia as the narrative of what happened in 1939-45 has been set pretty much in stone by two generations of establishment politicians and their court historians
Yeah..that was the key. They needed some messages in the clear to use to match up. Those messages in the clear could have also been delivered by spies within Germany.
I thought it was when the Americans captured
an Enigma machine from that German U-boat./s
Yes, but the real find was the Poles had cracked the Enigma and gave machines and their codebreaking methods to the British and French before Warsaw fell. Without that amazing selfless act it would have been much harder for the British to crack the succeeding Enigma codes.
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