The Imitation Game

I was really excited when the movie came out, however I was very disappointed. The misrepresented a lot of his life in order to tell a more Hollywood family story. Even ignoring the facts for a good story, the do some poor writing. For example they seem to slap on one of their main themes "its the people no one expects that accomplish the greats deeds." He was on a think tank....that's the very definition of people expecting you to accomplish things.

Alan Turing, to say the least, was a genius. The calibre of his genius is truly more of an enigma than the German's code machine proved to be. It is true that there had been theories, and even some experiments, exploring the possibility of immense machine-aided computation, but Turing made it a reality. The portrayal of Turing in this film lends itself to the authenticity of the title, but not because Turing himself is 'imitating', but because everyone else is. Turing is portrayed as being both literal and genuine, and almost incapable of understanding some of the nuance or imitation that 'normal' people employ in their day to day interactions. It's also a play on the reality that Turing had to lie about his achievements during the war, and his homosexuality. Most obviously though, it's borrowed from a paper he wrote to test machine's ability to confuse a human that it is also a person. The Turing Test. The fact I have written so much about just the title of this movie goes to show how much I truly enjoyed it. It's a wonderful glimpse into the life of the grandfather of the modern computer, and computer science- my chosen field of expertise. This is an easy 5/5 stars for me.

Everyone finally gets to learn about the genius that was Alan Turing. Studying Computer Science we got to learn about him, but I always felt like the general public using their computers everyday didn't have any sense that if it weren't for Turing you wouldn't have all your fancy toys. Finally the curtain is pulled back on his life and how we repaid him for everything he gave us because of his sexual orientation. Think of how much more he could have accomplished if we only allowed him to live.