Who Is Alan Turing´s The Imitation Game?

Known as “the father of computer sciences,” Alan Turing has been widely recognized by many for his accomplishments in pioneering the fields of mathematics computing and cryptography. A new film, The Imitation Game, focuses on his role during the Second World War in breaking Nazi Germany’s encryption machine, named “Enigma”. An extremely innovative and complex machine, Enigma allowed critical information, such as fleet positions and bombing targets, to be passed on to recipients without fear of interception. Though intercepting the messages was an easy task for the Allies, it was initially useless; Enigma acted as a translator, rearranging each message into a cipher that rendered each one gibberish to any unintended party without the right decryption key. Turing, then a professor of mathematics and

Though Turing’s anti-Enigma machine, named “Christopher” after his childhood friend, was much more efficient than any team of cryptographers working manually, it was too slow to solve each cipher by midnight of each day, at which point the Germans would change the encryption key and the process of cracking the cipher would have to start over. Coincidentally, it was the Germans themselves that contributed most to the code-breakers’ efforts. Most messages contained commonly used words and phrases, such as “Heil Hitler.” It was the predictability of this phrase and others like it that allowed Turing and his colleagues to set a starting point for the Christopher machine to break the cipher. Its success was limited, however. In order to maximize its effectiveness, the Germans could not find out that their encryption technique had been solved, and so the Allies were forced to allow attacks like the bombing raid on