The Imitation Game and Cracking the Code of the Human Mind

by Christopher Barr │POSTED ON DECEMBER 28, 2014

“….are you paying attention?”

There are some spoilers ahead.

The Imitation Game is a fascinating, thrilling film about of group of mathematicians and logicians that are brought together by the British Government to crack the Nazi’s Enigma code machine during World War II.  This, nail-biting race against time, film is about Englishman Alan Turing, an eccentric genius, whose love of puzzles and code-breaking essentially certified him to devise a machine, which can compute the solution to any solvable algorithm and could eventually decode Enigma messages.  As a result of this mountainous task, Alan Turing, the legendary cryptanalyst, built the first computer that functioned using a form of universality rather than specific programs that independently performed computational tasks.  At first, a hypothetical device, that Turing had been thinking about for years, which could follow instructions and was meant as a thought experiment to investigate the limits of mathematical systems.  The device became known to the world as The Turning Machine.

The brilliant team of code-breakers was brought together by the military and MI6 to Britain’s top-secret Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park.  Alan Turing, a wildly misunderstood thinker, was brought on board and told that the Nazi German Enigma machine is causing them to lose the war.  Dr. Turing, a man that doesn’t play well with others, wanted to work alone so he can build a machine that is able to crack Enigma, an electro-mechanical rotor cipher machine that was able to encipher and decipher secret messages sent to and from Nazi Military Forces.  The rest of the team and military involved in the top-secret operation thought Turing and his methods a bit bizarre.  People were not an important feature for the most part in the adult life of Alan Turing.

Turing took control of the operation thanks to the confidence of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who realized that intelligence wins wars and that Turing was undeniably intelligent.  Turing added Joan Clarke, a math genius in her own right, to help with ‘Christopher’.  That was the nickname Turing gave his machine he was building, named after his first love at age 16, Christopher Morcom back when he was in public school.  Joan Clarke’s function other than helping Turing flesh out the mathematical complexity and computation data created by Christopher, was to help this socially inept man work with others.  Joan Clarke, because she was a woman and at the time wasn’t allowed to work directly with the men, helped him out of his shell, and to realize that more heads were better than one.

While Turing struggled to complete his work on his machine with the ticking clock of the British military at his ear, the film cut back to his early childhood.  Here we got to see the awkward young Turing witness firsthand how much human beings love violence because it makes them feel good.  He also realized that if you eliminate what they are feeling good about, the suffering of others, then it is no longer fun for them.  The film also cuts to the future after the war where Turing has his apartment broken into, launching a police investigation ending with the arrest of Alan Turing, a secret war hero that no one ever heard of, for homosexual activity.

The film was surprisingly funny and equally if not more, heartbreaking.  The tragedy here is Turing killed himself because of depression at age 41, in all likelihood because the unenlightened courts charged him with gross indecency and forced him to take hormonal estrogen drugs to ‘cure’ his homosexual illness or go to jail for two years.  What happened here was an overwhelming amount of ignorance and fear essentially extinguishing the genius of Alan Turing.  The man could have gone on and accomplished who knows what had he lived into his eighties.  He added universality which gave birth to the modern computer while his law-enforcing contemporaries remained close-minded.

Hitler’s Nazi forces were beaten as a result of one man’s mind.  To repay this man for saving millions upon millions of lives, they chemically castrated him which led to his own death, by poisoning an apple and eating it.  Turing was always wary of lesser men than him.  Their ignorance certainly annoyed him because it’s likely he saw himself as the potential that could have been.  This is likely why he held such contempt for dumb people, not for any major egotistical reason, but because of the waste of the capacity of their own minds.

Like the Civil Rights Movement, homosexuality has become more acceptable in society but it still has a long way to go.  This is because of the dumb people that Turing feared and held contempt for in his time.  They don’t know why they have a problem with it.  From a ratiocinative standpoint, sexual identity isn’t anyone’s business.  Like racism, homosexuality only negatively affects dumb people.  Smart people never sit around plotting ways to rid the world of gay people.  Why, because they have better things to think about and do.  It’s really that simple, the hindrance here is the people who have a problem with homosexuality don’t really know why they do, they just do.  No one is born a bigot, a racist, or a homophobe, they are taught to hate people that are not like they are.  They do this out of fear because as stable as they like to think they are, they really have no idea about how they arrived at what it is they look at in a mirror every morning, and that terrifies the hell out of them.  This results in a system shut down, no more new information is allowed in their braincase.  They maintain their ignorance and stick to their group of bigots, racists, and homophobes for security. 

The film dealt with Alan Turing’s homosexuality and his punishment quite respectfully but more importantly, they didn’t allow the issue of homophobia to dominate the man’s true genius and contribution to computer sciences and society.  This discussion could come off as deliberately downplaying Turing’s homosexuality so homophobes aren’t dissuaded from attending the film.  The filmmakers acknowledged what had happened to him because it’s the most tragic part of his life, but out of respect for the work, they didn’t dwell on it.  Something as idiotic as homophobia, although a real problem for many in society, doesn’t deserve the platform that Alan Turing’s magnificent machine does.  

The filmmakers know as well that these issues of equality have been dealt with many times over.  The problem of sexual discrimination cannot be tackled from the top of a mountain, for that reform must come from the base.  People that go see movies like this know how they feel about homosexuality one way or another.  The problem is parents, ignorant parents, religious parents, are teaching their children to hate people that are not like them.  They are teaching their children that homosexuality is a disease that only God, medication, or violence can cure. 

Sadly, we live in a society filled with stupid people that think like this.  It’s unfortunate that so many of us are not nurtured to open our minds and see beyond our own fear-based ignorance.  If we want to shift the tide toward equality for all, we are going to have to cut the tether of religion and other Iron Age beliefs.  We are going to have to teach people that they can’t control the sexual preferences or lifestyles of other people.  Sadly we want to control so much, this is something we are going to have to get over in order to nurture this human project into a color-blind and sexually-oriented blind future.

One of the other major ethical dilemmas in the film was code-named ULTRA.  This was when Turing and his team broke Enigma’s code; they came to realize that they couldn’t use this newfound information to alert British and Allied forces of impending attacks by the Nazis.  Doing so would let the German military know that their Enigma machine was cracked.  Instead Turing with the help of MI6 would leak various planned Nazi attacks and attribute that discovery from some other intelligence source, or they would accredit the intelligence based on reconnaissance missions to disguise the source of ULTRA information.  They would also have to allow attacks that they are aware of happen, regardless of the deaths involved.

This is where the logic of utilitarianism was pushed to its ethical limits.  The greater good here had to prevail in order to win the war.   By doing this many lives were lost but hundreds of thousands ended up being saved as a result.  It is believed that because of Dr. Turing’s contribution, the war was shortened by at least two years.  After the war Turing assisted the British government with the early stages of computer programming.   Along with his Turing test, these contributions would later lead to massive computers, the internet, and cell phone technology.

The Turing Test is an imitation game that would place a human interrogator and two unseen entities in other rooms, where one is a human and the other is a computer.  If the interrogator was unable to tell which one is the human, then the computer was deemed to possess artificial intelligence.  Turing thought it didn't matter how intelligence was arrived at, merely how clever it was at its arrival. 

"A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human."  

- Alan Turing 

Alan Turing was an iconoclastic man that lived more in his head rather than in the social settings of city life.  He was a man, looking at the world of the mind from a skewed unorthodox perspective, that most would have sooner looked the other way because of this eccentricity.  But as a result of his inability or lack of interest, to be what was socially expected of him, he quite literally thought outside of the box.  True genius it appears is founded in solitude, where a man like Turing never really participated in what most people think of as ‘daily living’.  The one thing that this form of individualized thinking tells us is how diluted the average person’s thinking is because of environmental, educational, and sociological influences. 

The Imitation Game is a film about the endless capacity of the human mind.  It’s also about secrets, both personal and public, where knowledge of a man’s sexual orientation becomes the reason that inevitably ends in his death.  The film starts with Turing being interrogated by a police officer that at one point suspected he was a Russian spy.  He would later find out that what Turing was hiding, and not really well, was his homosexuality.  Turing wanted to know if the officer knew what he is, a war hero, a man, a homosexual.  Turing is pointing out how we are so behind when it comes to the potential of the human mind.  He feels, and rightly so, that we are all still caught up on titles and beliefs that never actually originated in our own minds, but were rather taught to us by scared, uninspired adults, devastated at the prospect of change.   

“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can

see plenty there that needs to be done.” 

- Alan Turing