Usually I prefer to introduce new books and sometimes to write a review about them.
Today I chose to introduce and speak about a movie. The Movie is called The imitation games and that I saw this week. It's greatness came from an excellent scrips and the high level playing of it's actors.
A good film can move you but a great one give you things to think about, send you to look for more information, to learn more, ....and in sum open your mind to possibilities, which this movie certainly did so.
So many impressions, in so many levels!! It deal and touch in so many things, Beside the WWII. Mainly it is raising the subject of the attitude of the society to the different. The different the film deal with are the gays, and the women.
But thing bother me mostly, one- who is the inventor of the Enigma. and Two - why the I didn't know about the only women in this film.
So here are few facts that I sum for you before I delve to other matters:
The movie is based on the biography Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges and adapted for the screen by Moore.
The Imitation Game
In 1939, newly created British intelligence agency MI6 recruits Cambridge mathematics alumnus Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) to crack Nazi codes, including Enigma -- which cryptanalysts had thought unbreakable. Turing's team, including Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), analyze Enigma messages while he builds a machine to decipher them. Turing and team finally succeed and become heroes, but in 1952, the quiet genius encounters disgrace when authorities reveal he is gay and send him to prison.
Actor Cumberbatch, plays Turing as the classic auto-didactic computer geek, a crossword puzzle wizard unpopular with his mates, sort of a premature Asperger's success story. Turing’s struggle to connect with others is a part of his appeal. He deals with his superiors and spies, all while trying to keep his homosexualitya secret (homosexuality was illegal in England at this time) take up a lot of the film.
Turing’s team, includes the combative, jealous Hugh (Matthew Goode), affable John (Allen Leech), soft-spoken Peter (Matthew Beard), and a woman, Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), who secures her unprecedented inclusion into the group by completing a complex crossword puzzle one minute faster than Turing himself, does not take to him at first. Neither does their commander, Alastair Dennison (Game of Thrones’ Charles Dance), who hires Turing out of necessity but, repelled by his apparent smugness and impudence, is continually looking for a reason to fire him. The great joy of the film then, alongside the thrill of Turing’s great technological discovery, is Turing learning how to bond with others, particularly with Joan, and watching the others learn how to bond with him.
Keira Knightley , Joan Clarke, who is among the brightest of the new recruits. Because she is a woman, she doesn't get the respect afforded the male code-breakers, but Turing sees only her ability. When Clarke's parents propose to take her away from the code-breaking operation at Bletchley Park, Turing proposes marriage to her to keep her with him. The relationship between Turing and Clarke is a fascinating one. While most of Turing's team of code-breakers is not really fleshed out in the film, Turing and Clarke certainly are.
Turing's “bombe” (decoding machine) was essentially a far more complicated version of Polish bombes built before the war to decipher Enigma codes. The Poles had reverse-engineered the German military Enigma machines and built their own copies, as well as machines to aide in breaking the codes. After Enigma is broken. For the first time, the group has to move to theory to application, realizing that even though they've solved the greatest cryptographic problem of all time, they're unable to tell more than a handful of people, and can't even use the information to save British troops as that would tip off the Germans that their transmissions were being decoded. In Order to prevent this Turing and his team had to use and develop statistic method for releasing the information the found and transfer it to he MI6 which where those which transfer it forward. The information was shared with Russian and French intelligence.
The British government credited Turing’s team with saving millions of lives while shortening the conflict in the European theater by a couple years.
Alan Mathison Turing,
(23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was a British pioneering computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, mathematical biologist, and marathon and ultra distance runner. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer.Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.
During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre. For a time he led Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including improvements to the pre-war Polish bombe method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. Turing's pivotal role in cracking intercepted coded messages enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis in many crucial engagements, including the Battle of the Atlantic; it has been estimated that the work at Bletchley Park shortened the war in Europe by as many as two to four years.
After the war, he worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he designed the ACE, among the first designs for a stored-program computer. In 1948 Turing joined Max Newman's Computing Laboratory at Manchester University, where he assisted development of the Manchester computers[8] and became interested in mathematical biology. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis, and predicted oscillatingchemical reactions such as the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, first observed in the 1960s.
Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts, when such behaviour was still criminalised in the UK. He accepted treatment with oestrogen injections (chemical castration) as an alternative to prison. Turing died in 1954, 16 days before his 42nd birthday, from cyanide poisoning. An inquest determined his death a suicide; his mother and some others believed it was accidental. In 2009, following an Internet campaign, British Prime MinisterGordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for "the appalling way he was treated". Queen Elizabeth II granted him a posthumous pardon in 2013.
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Joan Elisabeth Lowther Murray, MBE
(24 June 1917 – 4 September 1996) was an English cryptanalyst and numismatist best known for her work as a code-breaker at Bletchley Park during World War II. Joan Clarke's parents were William Kemp Lowther Clarke, a Clergyman, and Dorothy Elisabeth Clarke. She was their youngest child and had three elder brothers and one sister. Joan was educated at Dulwich High School and in 1936 matriculated at Newnham College, Cambridge, to study Mathematics. In 1937 and 1939 respectively, she achieved a First in Part I and Part II of the Mathematical Tripos (a three-year course leading to a BA degree) and became a Wrangler. In 1939 Clarke graduated, achieving a double first in Mathematics; however this was merely the title of her degree, as Cambridge did not admit women to "full membership of the body academic" until after the end of the Second World War. In 1939 Clarke was awarded the distinguished Philippa Fawcett Prize and in 1939-1940 the Helen Gladstone Scholarship.
In the film, Turing and Clarke meet when she responds to a newspaper ad calling for crossword puzzle solvers. She impresses him by solving a puzzle that took him eight minutes in just five-and-a-half minutes. He also appreciates that she has several Cambridge math degrees, even though the university at the time did not acknowledge women as full scholars. He quickly becomes her champion, not only overcoming his colleagues’ objections to hiring a female code breaker, but also her parents’ concerns about her working in a place full of men.
In reality, Turing and Clarke likely met even earlier, since one of her brothers was friends with Turing. She did earn several math degrees at Newnham College, Cambridge, and yes, women’s degrees were not fully embraced by the University until 1948. But Clarke, who was brilliant enough to become a Wrangler (a top math student), was recruited to Bletchley by a male professor Gordon Welchman, not by a crossword scheme.
Gordon Welchman was one of the four top mathematicians recruited in 1939 to set up decoding operations at Bletchley Park. During the time that Joan Clarke was an undergraduate at Cambridge, Gordon Welchman had supervised her in Geometry during Part II and, aware of her mathematical ability, he was responsible for recruiting Clarke to join the 'Government Code and Cypher School' (GCCS) at Bletchley Park.
Her first placement was humble enough, joining a large group of women, generally referred to as "the girls" who were engaged in routine clerical work in Hut 8. Even though the ratio of women to men working at Bletchley Park was 8:1, women were mostly employed in clerical and administration work and not the more intricate cryptology, which was a male dominated area. During her time at Bletchley Park, Clarke only ever knew of one other female mathematical cryptanalyst. Clarke was originally paid £2 a week - but as this was an era of female discrimination in the workplace, similarly qualified men received significantly more money.
Records describe Clarke as congenial but shy, gentle and kind, non-aggressive and always subordinate to the men in her life; qualities that would allow her to conform within the male dominated world of Bletchley Park. As a one which was never seek the spotlight, she quietly forgotten so, it’s good to see Clarke finally getting some recognition.
As an unmarried woman, it was also considered highly unsuitable for Clarke to work closely with men. Moreover, to receive a pay grade that equaled her male counterparts, Clarke’s official title was “Linguist,” though Clarke herself spoke no language but English.
In the film, she and Turing become close friends, and she helps him connect with the other men in his hut. In reality, Clarke and Turing were close friends. And Clarke was a big part of Hut 8’s work, getting her own desk and even becoming deputy head of the operation in 1944. Turing had left two years earlier to work with the United States Navy.
She worked at Bletchley Park in the section known as Hut 8 and quickly became one of the practitioners of Banburismus, a cryptanalytic process developed by Alan Turing which reduced the need for bombes. Hugh Alexander, head of Hut 8 from 1943 to 1944, described her as "one of the best Banburists in the section". Alexander himself was regarded as the best of the Banburists. He and I. J. Good considered the process more an intellectual game than a job. It was "not easy enough to be trivial, but not difficult enough to cause a nervous breakdown".
She became deputy head of Hut 8 in 1944. Code breaking was almost entirely done by men during the war. Clarke was paid less than the men and felt that she was prevented from progressing further because of her gender.
Clarke and fellow code-breaker Alan Turing became very good friends at Bletchley Park. Turing would arrange their shifts so they could be working together, and they also spent a lot of their free time together. In the spring of 1941, Turing proposed marriage to Clarke and subsequently introduced her to his family. After admitting his homosexuality to his fiancée, who was reportedly "unfazed" by the revelation, Turing decided that he could not go through with the marriage and broke up with Clarke in the summer of 1941.
Relationship with Alan Turing
Clarke and fellow code-breaker Alan Turin became very good friends at Bletchley Park. Turing would arrange their shifts so they could be working together, and they also spent a lot of their free time together. In the spring of 1941, Turing proposed marriage to Clarke and subsequently introduced her to his family. After admitting his homosexuality to his fiancée, who was reportedly "unfazed" by the revelation, Turing decided that he could not go through with the marriage and broke up with Clarke in the summer of 1941. To understand her decision to continue with the engagement following his disclosure, it has to be made clear that during this period in history, marriage for many women, was considered a social duty and it was not necessary that marriage should correspond with sexual desires. An interview for a BBC Horizon documentary, aired in 1992.
Clarke wasn’t the only female code breaker at Bletchley Park. There were at least three others, including Margaret Rock, who worked in Cottage 3 under Dilly Knox, a male code breaker as respected as Turing. Knox led an all-female team and they decoded the Enigma machine responsible for German military intelligence. Here’s hoping that the legacy of Clarke, Rock, and other women working in STEM during the war get more attention thanks to The Imitation Game.
An Enigma machine
was any of several codesigned electro-mechanical rotor cipher machines used in the twentieth century for enciphering and deciphering secret messages. Enigma was invented by the German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I. Early models were used commercially from the early 1920s, and adopted by military and government services of several countries—most notably by Nazi Germany before and during World War II. Several different Enigma models were produced, but the German military models are the most commonly recognized.
German military messages enciphered on the Enigma machine were first broken by the Polish Cipher Bureau, beginning in December 1932. This success was a result of efforts by three Polish cryptologists, Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski, working for Polish military intelligence. Rejewski "reverse-engineered" the device, using theoretical mathematics and material supplied by French military intelligence. Subsequently the three mathematicians designed mechanical devices for breaking Enigma ciphers, including the cryptologic bomb.
From 1938 onwards, additional complexity was repeatedly added to the Enigma machines, making decryption more difficult and necessitating larger numbers of equipment and personnel—more than the Poles could readily produce.
On 25 July 1939, in Warsaw, the Poles initiated French and British military intelligence representatives into their Enigma-decryption techniques and equipment, including Zygalski sheets and the cryptologic bomb, and promised each delegation a Polish-reconstructed Enigma. The demonstration represented a vital basis for the later British continuation and effort.
During the war, British cryptologists decrypted a vast number of messages enciphered on Enigma. The intelligence gleaned from this source, codenamed "Ultra" by the British, was a substantial aid to the Allied war effort. Though Enigma had some cryptographic weaknesses, in practice it was German procedural flaws, operator mistakes, laziness, failure to systematically introduce changes in encipherment procedures, and Allied capture of key tables and hardware that, during the war, enabled Allied cryptologists to succeed.
Basic operation
A German Enigma operator would be given a plaintext message to encrypt.
For each letter typed in, a lamp indicated a different letter according to a pseudo-random substitution, based upon the wiring of the machine.
The letter indicated by the lamp would be recorded as the enciphered substitution.
The action of pressing a key also moved the rotor so that the next key press used a different electrical pathway, and thus a different substitution would occur.
For each key press there was rotation of at least the right hand rotor, giving a different substitution alphabet. This continued for each letter in the message until the message was completed and a series of substitutions, each different from the others, had occurred to create a cyphertext from the plaintext.
The cyphertext would then be transmitted as normal to an operator of another Enigma machine. This operator would key in the cyphertext and—as long as all the settings of the deciphering machine were identical to those of the enciphering machine—for every key press the reverse substitution would occur and the plaintext message would emerge.
Arthur Scherbius (20 October 1878 – 13 May 1929) was a German electrical engineer who patented an invention for a mechanical cipher machine, later sold as the Enigma machine.
Augusta Ada King,
Countess of Lovelace (10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852), born Augusta Ada Byron and now commonly known as Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. Her notes on the engine include what is recognized as the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine. Because of this, she is often described as the world's first computer programmer.
Lovelace was born 10 December 1815 as the only child of the poet Lord Byron and his wife Anne Isabella Byron. All Byron's other children were born out of wedlock to other women.
Byron separated from his wife a month after Ada was born and left England forever four months later, eventually dying of disease in the Greek War of Independence when Ada was eight years old.
Ada's mother remained bitter towards Lord Byron and promoted Ada's interest in mathematics and logic in an effort to prevent her from developing what she saw as the insanity seen in her father, but Ada remained interested in him despite this (and was, upon her eventual death, buried next to him at her request).
Ada described her approach as "poetical science" and herself as an "Analyst (& Metaphysician)". As a young adult, her mathematical talents led her to an ongoing working relationship and friendship with fellow British mathematician Charles Babbage, and in particular Babbage's work on the Analytical Engine. Between 1842 and 1843, she translated an article by Italian military engineer Luigi Menabrea on the engine, which she supplemented with an elaborate set of notes of her own, simply called Notes. These notes contain what many consider to be the first computer program—that is, an algorithm designed to be carried out by a machine.
Lovelace's notes are important in the early history of computers. She also developed a vision on the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching, while others, including Babbage himself, focused only on those capabilities. Her mind-set of "poetical science" led her to ask questions about the Analytical Engine (as shown in her notes) examining how individuals and society relate to technology as a collaborative tool.
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