Sunday, February 22, 2015

"The Imitation Game" - Alan Turing

Ei meeldinud ÜLDSE.
Turingist tehti karikatuur. Loole lisati kunstlikult mitu vinti põnevikku peale, aga lugu ikkagi ei tekkinud. Koodimurdmise pool oli läbinisti VALE. Turingi autisim mängiti täiesti üle. Tema "akadeemilisus" ja eluvõõrus mängiti samuti täiesti üle. Tuletame meelde, et 1939. aasta septembriks oli ta juba aastajagu Briti luure palgal olnud - ta ei saabnud Bletchleysse naiivse teadurina, ei!

Turing oli huvitav tegelane, ja tema lugu on korraga nii imeline kui kurb, aga film.. ei olnud hea.

Arvustus:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/02/21/the-imitation-game-can-this-big-fat-cliche-win-best-picture.html

Kopeerime lõike internetist kah:

"What I find ironic is how they manage to mention the people who actually cracked Enigma twice and only in passing. First one of those British intelligence types blurts out something about Enigma being "stolen by Polish intelligence" and a second time when Turing claims his machine is based on "an old Polish decryption device" (or something to that effect). At the time this movie is supposed to have happened the bomba kryptologiczna, which is probably what they are referring, to was about 3 years old. That may be dated technology today but by the standard of the 1930s three years was not 'old technology'. Turing achieved great things but he and his team didn't crack Enigma all on their own with British ingenuity. They stood on the shoulders of people like Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski and many others who cracked Enigma with Polish ingenuity. They were the ones who originally had the audacity to think that they could crack the world's most sophisticated cypher technology with the meagre resources the Polish cypher bureau had."


The movie got four things right!
1. Alen Turing was gay.
2. He was briefly engaged to his coworker lady friend.
3. He worked on Enigma.
4. He died after the war.

Besides that it was a complete fiction. "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" was more historically accurate.
If you want the truth, I suggest starting with wikipedia: "Marian Rejewski", then "Bombe", then "Bletchley Park", then "Coventry Blitz".
Sadly, the real story is way more interesting and moved much faster than the movie. The Poles gave Enigma cracking plans to the French and the Brits on July 24th 1939. The Brits started up Bletchley Park, brought in Turing and many others, and had a working Enigma cracking program (many machines) by the end of fall 1939!

Another interesting detail that many books on Enigma (and this movie very loosely alludes to) still get wrong has to do with the German upgrade to their code machine in 1942. David Kahn in his "The Codebreakers" book attributes the success in cracking Enigma after 1942 to capturing code books. The truth is that Alan Turing became the technical ambassador to the United States and came over the pond November 1942. He met with some engineers at NCR and developed an electronic version of the mechanical bombe, the plans were finished and approved by the US Navy in January 1943, and the first working prototypes that were 10000 faster than the British bombs were working by May. The rest of that story is at wikipedia: "United States Naval Computing Machine Laboratory".

These are the stories I want to see, not the I'm-the-misunderstood-genius-Asperger-syndrome Turning bullshit that "Imitation Game" put out there.



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