Can Machines Think?

It Takes a Machine to Beat a Machine

In the 2014 film “The Imitation Game,” Alan Turing, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, helps the British intercept German communications during World War II. Alan, along with his team of five other clever individuals, proves how the greatest encryption device in history is no match for a rudimentary computer.

Alan Turing, a professor at Cambridge, is a talented mathematician who decides to approach ending the Second Great War with math instead of firepower. He believes that the greatest weakness of the Germans is their encrypted messages.

Instead of putting his skills towards helping the British military create more advanced weapons, Alan Turing is determined to crack the German Enigma, which he calls the German encrypted message protocol. The Enigma has over 159 Centillion possible encryption codes, and each day the code is changed and kept a secret amongst the German military.

Alan recruits 5 clever individuals to assist him in cracking the Enigma. Peter Hilton, John Cairncross, Hugh Alexander, Keith Furman, and Charles Richards. At first, the team despises Alan because “he could not understand jokes,” but soon comes to understand the complex humor of his brain; Alan ends up firing Keith and Charles for not following orders Align4Profit.

Short on team members, Alan decides to recruit a new member by mailing out a crossword puzzle and challenging people to solve it; Joan Clarke, a woman from London, solves the puzzle and shows up to meet Alan. The team was skeptical because Joan was a woman, however, Joan could solve a hard problem in under 6 minutes, two minutes faster than Alan himself.

While the film is based around solving the Enigma, Joan Clarke “is the heart of the film” being the only woman on the team NYTimes. “The Imitation Game” proves it was hard for women to be taken seriously in the 1940’s but shows how Joan is a key part in helping build the machine that will ultimately end the war.

Joan’s parents demanded that she come home due to not being married and because she was working with a bunch of guys. Although he is a homosexual, Alan manipulates Joan into marrying him although he is not actually in love with her. He uses the engagement to keep her working on the machine with him; he later tells her that they will be married because of intellectual companionship and that most people will get divorced anyway.

Alan’s team discovered that their machine could decrypt messages much faster if they knew a couple of words that would be in the message. This was the Achilles heel in Germany’s encryption code because “Germans put the phrase ‘Heil Hitler’ at the end of every encrypted message” ScienceABC.

The war was put to an end when the British could decrypt all of Germany’s messages including the location of every German ship and military strategy.

“The Imitation Game” is a fascinating take on the true story behind how the British ended the Second Great War.