The Imitation Game

 

Went into the cinema darkness and laughed a bit about the words that just popped into my mind when watching the movie: data structures, algorithms, pointer, array, balanced trees, hashing, Pascal, Turing, programming and the list goes on. Some will go "Huh?!" as not all on them were even mentioned in the movie - other will laugh as it reveals some of my past.

Well once upon a time a young lady thought, that computer science was going to be her future, so she went to university to study it. That young lady was me only to find out, that I need interaction with people and not just sit behind a computer screen developing software etc. so I changed major after 4 years of studying.

The movie "The Imitation Game" is about Alan Turing and the Enigma machine invented during WW2 to decode the Germans' coded messages. We heard about the Turing Machines (now know to us as early computers)  in some of the classes at the university as his work was important in the evolution of computers. I was surprised to learn, when the British revealed a well kept secret from WW2, that Turing and some others had actually managed to crack the Enigma code and used some of the intelligence reports thereof to defeat the enemy in strategic places/battles.

Another story within the story is, that Alan Turing was homosexual - at that time a crime in the UK - could it be used against him and would people stop working with him when they found out? Alan Turing committed suicide in 1954 - later to be questioned as it could also have been a fatal accident when handling cyanide.

Yes Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing is eye candy, and so is Matthew Goode as Hugh Alexander - you can never go wrong with adding Keira Knighly as the only female in Turing's code-breaking team. But the story was also luring me into the cinema to learn more about this event in the history books.