A Poor Imitation: The Real Alan Turing w/ James Grime

[@AnotherRoof]

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[@sugarfrosted2005]

Thank you for this! The strange detail in where Turing didn't know German was a really odd choice, since he corresponded with Gödel in German

[@Thomas-f6y5t]

It makes sense in the context of the narrative - which is 'oddball outsider runs contrary to all expectations and succeeds spectacularly through his unique perspective'. Not speaking German made him the underdog and made for a funny exchange with the Commander (not to mention the audience can be sympathetic towards him more easily).

[@orbatos]

​@@Thomas-f6y5t Except it really didn't achieve that at all, at least to me.

[@GamerGamer-z5s]

I ivite you people to listen to the recitaion of the Noble Quran kzbin.info/www/bejne/f3y9Zmqpmch5gZYsi=i8lD0MDkwVHgdQA3

[@z-beeblebrox]

@@Thomas-f6y5t But it's NOT EVEN TRUE AHHHHHHH

[@delphicdescant]

@@z-beeblebrox Hollywood caring more about spectacle than accuracy? Couldn't be.

[@uuhamm]

I feel like the biggest problem with the way Alan Turing is portrayed in the movie is that he's portrayed with just offensively one dimensional autism spectrum trait stereotypes almost completely erasing his humanity and personality at times. Such a missed opportunity to portray a brilliant and quirky individual.

[@anon5890]

That's exactly what annoyed me. They effectively erased his actual character. He was a legitimately interesting man and I found it offensive that he was reduced to a stereotype. It felt lazy, like they didn't do any research.

[@Nicoder6884]

Yeah, as an aspie myself I almost immediately noticed they were trying to make him aspie (which there's questionable evidence for in the first place), but ended up making him just an ass.

[@Vangard21]

I think they felt they needed some driving conflict early in the movie. Else it's just a guy going to a job interview. The late-movie conflict was easy - his persecution for his sexuality. But for the beginning, they manufactured conflict by making their main character stereotypically insufferable against everyone around him.

[@minamagdy4126]

What I would've do e, and there are traces of this in the movie, is went with the "this is no joking matter" approach, as in the enigma is the villain. I believe they went too dar in the direction of the general being an antagonistic fool. It would've been interesting to have a lighter cipher be cracked by Turing for an interview, or even as little as rattling off his achievements while also giving other candidates the spotlight.

[@NitFlickwick]

Portraying coded autism as “this guy is just a jerk”. That almost never happens.

[@AndreasHontzia]

As a German Turning has a special place in my life. My grandpa and his brother fought in WW2, were prisoners of war and both had scientific jobs. After the war one was living in West Germany and one East Germany. So a split family. My father was an officer in the Bundeswehr (German Army) and he had a book called: Enigma by Robert Harris. I read it as a teenager and was fascinated by it. This is one reason I chose a very specific career path. After school I also joined the Bundeswehr and became an officer myself. I got a diploma in computer science and dug into cryptography. We had one trimester of number theory and cryptography and worked also through the inner workings of the Enigma. After 12 years I left the Bundeswehr and now I am working in the field of information security. I can say: We need strong cryptography, a strong and peaceful Europe, and we need to share with all people around the globe. I talked to hackers from over 20 countries and it's everywhere the same story. History must not repeat itself. Thank you for this great video!

[@jecelassumpcaojr890]

The worst disservice to Turing was having the framing device be him spilling national secrets to some random policeman who was interviewing him. Nobody involved ever told anybody at all until it was declassified in the 1970s. So the movie shows him committing treason, which carried a death penalty even after the war. About his time in Manchester, he was using a computer designed and built by other people because his own project, the Ace at NPL (National Physics Laboratory) was taking too long for his taste. After he left, the NPL team finished a reduced version named Pilot Ace and later a few machines followed the same style. But while the Manchester machine would look very familiar to us, the Turing design was very odd and ended up being a dead end in the evolution of computers.

[@mina86]

8:10 - this reminds me of Sully where for similar reason they portrayed NTSB as villains where in reality they were absolutely on the crew’s side in their finding. I contrast it with The Martian which demonstrated that you can have a good film without a conscious antagonist. But I guess some film makers are stuck with thinking that ‘man vs man’ is the only possible source of tension in a story.

[@AnotherRoof]

@@mina86 Ahh yes The Martian is a good example!

[@frederf3227]

All Hollywood biopic type films are like this. ___ was down on his/her luck but he/she's determined to ____ no matter what those snobs in _____ think or even their best friend! Despite constant doubt they finally did it alone! Also there's a love interest.

[@StoicTheGeek]

Apollo 13 was another one. In the movie, Swigert (Bacon) is shown as having somewhat questionable ability, and there is tension with the rest of the crew. In reality, he was extremely competent and Lovell and Haise had complete confidence in him.

[@wolf1066]

I'm personally sick to bloody death of man vs man conflict in stories. Even Man vs Himself/His "inner demons" is overdone. I'd love to see more movies where the source of conflict is something else entirely - the weather or a tricky puzzle or a broken piece of essential equipment and an incomplete toolkit! Anything that has serious stakes and the potential to make life harder for the protagonists but have the people actually *_get along_* and _help_ each other for once.

[@c1ph3rpunk]

@@wolf1066not sure what you do, or where at, I’m in security, software, other humans, be they internal politics or external threat actors, are my no 1 antagonist in the movie that is “My Life”. Though I do agree in principle, that they’ve made a tiresome trope out of it, some originality would be a pleasant change. A good adversary in this case could have been the computer itself, lord knows I feel like they are daily. The “I can see the answer but our technology hasn’t evolved enough to bring it to life” type of thing perhaps.

[@kujojotarostandoceanman2641]

my favorite part of the movie is when Allen Turing said "it's turing time" and ture all over them, it really makes me feels like a turing machine

[@jeremydavis3631]

"Sitting at a desk for _dozens_ of hours every day"? Assuming that's not every hour of every day, I'm impressed that you found a way to cram more than the standard 2 dozen hours into a day! 😉

[@AnotherRoof]

My desk moves at relativistic speeds...

[@daanwilmer]

​@@AnotherRoofwouldn't that contract your time, making it so the desk experiences even fewer than two dozen hours per day? I might be wrong and in need of a refresher on relativity theory, though.

[@kekitech]

Did you also win future and past chess tournaments, twice, using such a desk?

[@FrenchCanadianGuy]

​@daanwilmer when one rule is broken, why not one more?

[@GamerGamer-z5s]

I ivite you people to listen to the recitaion of the Noble Quran kzbin.info/www/bejne/f3y9Zmqpmch5gZYsi=i8lD0MDkwVHgdQA3

[@reidflemingworldstoughestm1394]

He did deserve better. They even reused that entirely fictitious bar>girls>insight-to-his-problem scene straight from the John Nash biopic. Bullocks.

[@rustycherkas8229]

Yeah. Turing designed and built (or had built) "Christopher" to search for something... And, he didn't know what it was to search for until that night in the pub. Yes, a dramatic moment, but ... c'mon, eh?

[@RoamingAdhocrat]

I found the film so grating because what I knew/remembered was so much more interesting than the watered-down, time-displaced narrative in the film. like, the Poles demonstrated they could break Enigma, but what they couldn't do was afford to build lots of additional bombes for each permutation of cipher wheels

[@STEAMerBear]

Pardon me for speaking like a mathematician, but that’s my gig. I was an Army cryptanalyst and I’m now a math & science teacher. Historical fiction (HF) as a genre spans a vast literary and historical space. To the degree that it touches on real people or comes close to significant events, it moves toward factual revisionism, urban mythology, propaganda and all manner of apocryphal narrative sourcing. It’s just profoundly irresponsible to creatively embellish true and important history with what are known falsehoods. This contrasts sharply with guessing and filling in the blanks as even the best scholars are inclined to do. When we inject intentional errors into the minds of audiences who believe what they are seeing to be framed in mostly true history, we distort popular notions of reality. The higher order implications include increased social and philosophical controversy for no reason other than theatrics. Therefore, we should be especially careful tolerating dramatic embellishments where evidence or factuality matter. This also applies to current events. No amount of entertainment will ever ethically or morally justify the intentional dumbing down of society. It is fundamentally a vile practice and it should always be rejected.

[@PhilippeCarphin]

I agree with you. As I watch a movie, I don't take anything for granted. For example I don't think John Nash thought of his "Nash equilibrium" while he was at a bar with his 3 buddies looking at a group of 4 women one of which was hotter than the others. A Beautiful Mind didn't mislead me into thinking that was the case. But I was amazed at how many details from The Imitation Game were just plain false. Like with the Soviet spy. I know nothing can be taken for granted but for sure if they put that in the movie, there must have been something between Turing and a Soviet spy. The thing with the bell at midnight: I was kind of shocked to hear that there was nothing even close to that in the real story. Of course you can't trust movies but surely they put that in there because at midnight everyone had to stop working yesterday's codes and start working on the next day's codes. Maybe there's just no bell, maybe it's just the supervisor that comes in the room and tells everybody to move on to the next day's codes. And now I hear it's just "nope, we invented that part oopsie".

[@STEAMerBear]

@@PhilippeCarphin Yes, I wholeheartedly agree. I recently watched “Fly Me to the Moon,” and was left wondering how much is known, what’s legitimate speculation and where any legitimacy gives way to full blown creative license. These days so many people are willing to race across these lines who would have never dared just 10 years ago. Legitimate questions are belittled, people are destroyed and society is degraded in service to fictions. For example, I wonder if Kamala Harris isn’t being figuratively “prophetic” in what I see as her effort to induce political, social & cultural amnesia. She wants us to forget “what has been”-what makes America distinct and noteworthy-in favor of her feel good notions of joy and optimism. That effort falls flat with thiughtfull people as totally (probably intentionally) oblivious to the realities of unchecked immigration, including the associated fentanyl and violent crime crises. It also ignores the unprecedented inflation over which she and Joe Biden have presided. We are all necessarily burdened by our past, it shapes us and informs our present. To pretend otherwise at any level is to invite ruin. History is filled with examples of fallen societies unable to accept reality. America is too strong, too genuinely diverse and frankly too important to be destroyed through such mass delusions.

[@SMJSmoK]

My pet peeve was that during the ending they say something like "today we call Turing machines computers". Like, no, that's not true at all. The concept of Turing machines (and also Turing completeness etc.) has a specific meaning, it's not a synonym for computer and it's still used in computer science today. I think this actually does a big disservice to Turing, because when people learn what the Turing machine actually is, they will think "ok so the film was full of BS, I guess they tried to inflate Turing's contribution to computing while the only thing he did was some mathematical concept".

[@moatef1886]

I think some math correspondent was enthusiastically sharing how Turing machines are "equivalent" to general purpose computers in their expressive power to recognize the same class of languages modern computers can recognize, but this got jumbled up by a lot of movie people until it reached the writers where they said what they said about "Today we call Turing machines computers".

[@annaclarafenyo8185]

It is absolutely a synonym for computer. The general purpose computer only differs from a Turing machine in that it has a finite memory, that's all. A Turing machine is an idealized general purpose computer with a potentially infinite store of memory, so it never runs out. That's the mathematical definition.

[@annaclarafenyo8185]

Why would you make this comment? It is ridiculous, you speak as if you understand the concepts, and if you actually understood them, you would know that "Turing machine" is a synonym for "computer", while "Turing completeness" means "can be used as a general purpose computer".

[@supasugaman]

​@@annaclarafenyo8185 Technically a Turing machine is a particular model of computation. It is useful for modelling the concept of computability. If you are interested in finer questions regarding computational complexity there are some subtleties. If you want talk about linear time computation then there is a distinction between single-tape and multi-tape turing machines, for example.

[@Xerofyt]

A Turing machine is a theoretical model for reasoning about computability. A computer (nowadays) is a physical object that computes things. They're not unrelated, but one is not an instance of the other. You wouldn't call some other Church-Turing equivalent model of computation like the iota combinator a computer, or call a computer an iota combinator.

[@not_David]

I was actually wanting to do a deep dive into how this movie did turing dirty for a long time now! I haven’t had a chance to watch just yet but excited to tonight!

[@WoolyCow]

a rare not david has been spotted in the wild!

[@rasmis]

As a closeted gay man, I was drawn to human rights from an early age. Went deep on minority discrimination during my studies in Copenhagen and Nottingham. UK legislation and oppression of LGBT+ people had a profound impact across the continent, and Alan Turing is an critical part of that history. But the movie just glossed over that bloodstain on European history, and instead of portraying reality, they invented a way to portrait a victim as a criminal.

[@Phanimations]

I did really like 'The Imitation Game', though it was fairly obvious that it wasn't too historically accurate. I kind of put it in the same vein as "A Beautiful Mind," which embellishes (and outright retcons) history for the sake of a narrative. It's definitely possible to have both historical accuracy and a fulfilling narrative, but it's definitely hard.

[@moatef1886]

I think "A Beautiful Mind", while not historically accurate, is more historically accurate than "The Imitation Game" but again I don't think just being historically inaccurate is a bad thing. It's the way in which they do it. The historical inaccuracies of "The Imitation Game" just make Turing seem like an asshole, his mathematician colleagues seem like idiots/haters, military people are made to seem like idiots, and it's just generally kind of cringe.

[@Akio-fy7ep]

@@moatef1886 That said, British officers were as a rule fantastically thick-headed, chosen for upper-class heritage rather than ability.

[@scaredyfish]

I do like historical drama, but I almost feel like there should be a contractual obligation to also produce a documentary which clarifies which choices were made for dramatic purposes, and which are historically accurate. Often I’ll read a Wikipedia page after watching a movie like that, but that’s not ideal either.

[@PiersCawley]

Apparently Freeman Dyson, who knew Turing, called the film "The Irritation Game."

[@seanhunter111]

As someone who has looked up to Turing since I was a child this film was such a terrible disappointment. It seems so sad to me that they didn't take the opportunity to tell the real story of this amazing man and how terribly he was betrayed by his country. Instead they chose to make a cliché that is so much less interesting than the true story.

[@hughcaldwell1034]

The joke that "they got that his name was Alan" is doubly funny to me since the audio description for the film says "based on the book by Alan Hodges". The book is by Andrew Hodges. Anyway, best part of TIG is by far the soundtrack, which I still listen to.

[@koenth2359]

"The code book" by Simon Singh was my introduction to the workings of Enigma. I found it quite good!

[@ianglenn2821]

Mentioning other early visionaries, in 1922 a guy named Lewis Fry Richardson published a plan to do weather forecasting using massive multi-core parallelized computing. Of course, he was talking about human computers, but speculating on the important aspect of how even with fast computers, for large problems, the limitations quickly become message passing.

[@gordonelliott7870]

Absolutely wonderful! I absolutely adore "The Imitation Game" but completely agree that nothing in the movie happened. I'll start with 3:50 where supposedly Commander Denniston meets Turing for the first time. Later he is shown the Enigma machine, captured by the "Polish". The real story is much more compex: Turing had already been working with Denniston for years, and in fact Dilly Knox, Denniston, and Turing went to a building in a Polish forest to meet the Polish cryptanalysts and bring back representative equipment and the supposed "old Polish decoding" machine. Denniston's plane was almost shot down on the way back, so Turing and Denniston had shared a great deal of danger as well by this point. Denniston never was at odds with Turing because they had already worked together to get the Bombe project going over a period of years. Denniston knew it wasn't "unbreakable" because he and Dilly Knox had been breaking earlier versions for years. But the complexity of the Enigma in use had increased by the point of the movie introduction scene and they were indeed needing to advance on the Polish machine methods. Oh, yes, 6:14 this is the wrong list of people for Turing's initial work, and Turing's connections were responsible for a few of the people brought on (missing from that video). They all knew the mathematical numbers of the combinations; the Polish scientists had already broken that down and I even worked out a great many mathematical details accurately. 7:37 Absolutely correct, no way Denniston was critical of Turing at this point! Furthermore, Denniston had already recruited Turing a few years earlier, and they already risked their lives together to obtain the Polish codebreaking equipment and scientists. It's not just implausible on logical grounds as commander, it is directly counterfactual because they had already worked out plans to do the machine building by that point in actual history. Yes, 10:01, those general ideas were hatched long ago, and they just were getting down to serious work building the machines by this point. Even Dilly Knox (who started decoding with Denniston from WWI) had recommended building improved Bombe machines by this point. (And then died shortly after the move to Bletchley Park.) By the way they iterated through building various versions of multiple Bombe machines with full support of management and a great many workers on the construction. In addition, Denniston was not confrontational like shown in the movie, in fact when Bletchley Park became a huge operation Denniston was replace precisely because he was a very good managers of a research project but not a good manager of a huge bureaucratic operation in part because he was too nice. 11:26 Turing was never suspected of spying (at the time), and I think that he didn't really interact with the person who was eventually caught as a Soviet spy because that person I believe was in a different unit. (From possibly faulty memory of readings, needs checking.) NOW in the aftermath, long after the movie is over, multiple characters from the events were in trouble because of the "Red Scare" and anti-Communist activities, including Gordon Welchman (actual inventor of "diagonal board") in the US was stripped of clearance, and what happened to Turing was not uncommon. Looking up John Cairncross (spy) you accuratly tell that he was in a different department. He apparently gave "Tuny" information to the Soviets, which was a much latter and entirely separate project at Bletchley with the "Colossus" vacuum tube logic system to decode "Lorenz" cypher and designed by Tommy Flowers with minimal input from Turing, so not even in the neighborhood of the movie timeline and Enigma decryption. 16:00 Of course police scene is complete fabrication, but some of the ideas do come from Turing's writings and I did enjoy that part greatly. 17:00 Yes! I got caught up in Turing research because my graduate work was in pattern matching search algorithms and knew of the "Turing Test" for AI and computer mathematics like "Turing machine," but never knew of Turing's codebreaking secret work before watching this film. I discovered that algorithms I was developing had vague similarities to search algorithms Turing was building into the rotor based "tree search" algorithm of the Bombe long before the first computer ever existed! Gordon Welchman's "Diagonal Board" if I understand correctly is a tree pruning mechanism of constraint satisfaction built in hardwire and relay logic, once again before the first actual computer. 17:40 indeed, Turing wrote about a version of "neural networks" long before anyone actually implemented them. 18:00 In the end he was hounded in part because the spy operations were worried about his vulnerability, not just what the courts did to him. He had tried to work on actual developing "computer" projects but turned out not to be very good at that, amazingly, and others built much more effective actual computer hardware. Both his letters and other reports show that his "nerd" aspects were misrepresented, and he was much more social. Christopher Maughan was indeed an early dear friend, and I don't think was a homosexual relationship though probably influenced by Turing's homosexuality, and Maughan did die at a young age and is prominent in Turing's letters. His later work on physical computers would have been at Manchester itself, never a small copy in his home of course, these are big expensive projects and were supported by grants or gifts to the college. 20:30 And very much so, he was not working on "artificial intelligence" when working on computer hardware, this anthropomorphizing is misplaced as you note. (Although his lifelong work was about mechanizing tasks that humans could do.) He very much did think about AI in terms of neural networks but would not have romanticized the instruction following capabilities in the early computers in development at the time, including at Manchester. 23:27 The character that says "What just happened" is I. J (Jack) Good. (Agree on your statements.) My connection is that I was working in AI constraint satisfaction tree search algorithm research (see connection to codebreaking search above) while taking classes at Virginia Tech, where I J Good was a teacher at the time. His name came up regularly in discussions and I wish I had gone to one of his lectures or talks. To the best of my knowledge, I never met him though being in close proximity and regularly hearing his name at the time. I J Good was one of the first to write about the idea of a "singularity" in which our dependence on AI becomes irreversible. Oh yes, 24:17, my favorite movie computer misrepresentation is Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, in which Scottie tries first to speak to the Macintosh mouse as though it was a microphone, then immediately knows how to do CAD drawings by keyboard a few seconds later. (We still don't have the level of AI represented in the Star Trek movies!) I cannot possibly judge the "quality" of the film or disagree, because I learned so many ideas that I went back to research the real versions after being captivated by the film. (And learning how wrong it was yet still leading me to such riches of information.) You should know that _Alan Turing: The Enigma_ by Andrew Hodges, even though it may have a picture from The Imitation Game and statements about inspiring the film, is a very well researched and entirely solid account. WELL DONE!

[@mydwchannel]

Hidden Figures or Marguerite's Theorem next? Props to EVA Air for having two films ostensibly about mathematics in their in-flight entertainment! Watched them back to back on the way back from Taiwan, keen to hear your take on either :)

[@JMDinOKC]

Many years ago, the BBC science series "Horizon" did a 4-part (I think) series on Bletchley Park. The PBS (US) counterpart program is "Nova." They cut the BBC series down to 2 hours and added material about Arlington Hall, the US's counterpart to Bletchley Park. The most interesting part of that is that Bletchley Park and Arlington Hall actually collaborated. That PBS episode is where I learned about Alan Turing. There are also 2 other films that were inspired by ("based on" is being way too charitable) Turing and/or the Enigma machine: "U-571" (2000) and "Enigma" (2001).

[@gljames24]

I feel bad for Tommy Flowers as he was a true genius and the real father of modern digital computers. Many of his advancements in the Colossus weren't rediscovered until way later and he build the whole thing with his own money leaving him pennyless after the war and almost all of his work was destroyed until someone went back and rebuilt it based on interviews and scant materials.

[@EagleOfToledo]

Very pleased to find this video interview as it confirms a lot of what irritated me about the movie. Excellent job guys ! I had the honour of meeting one of his MSc students when I worked at the University of Manchester (he was in his 80s) and indeed Turing wasn't quite the troubled awkward character portrayed in this movie, and it would have been great to see more of his fun and mischievous personality. Furthermore, the pioneering work he carried out in the field of morphogenesis was equally significant and interesting to code-breaking, so yet again such an opportunity missed in the movie.

[@kindlin]

23:04 And they should of [asked me about the script], cuz I would have _GONE through that script,_ *big breath **_immediate cut_*

[@IceMetalPunk]

While Turing was definitely ahead of his time in his thoughts about thinking machines, I think it's important to note that he was far from the first to do so. Ada Lovelace, at the end of her seminal paper in which she described the first computer program for Babbage's Difference Engine, had a whole section of then-fanciful speculation about what such computing devices could one day do: compose music, discover mathematical proofs, etc. Creative endeavors often thought of as uniquely human, she understood could be performed with enough calculation... and now we have AI that does all the things she imagined. I don't know whether Lovelace was the first to think about such things in such contexts, but she was certainly prescient about it at a level of understanding most people weren't until the 1950s at best. (Sorry, I know this is a Turing video; but I'm a big fan of Lovelace, so I had to mention that 😅)

[@cube2fox]

With all respect to Lovelace, I think the first person who described a program for Babbage's computing device was clearly Babbage himself.

[@IceMetalPunk]

@@cube2fox Not as far as I'm aware. He built the machine, but hadn't actually written any programs for it. He collaborated with Lovelace to help him figure that part out.

[@cube2fox]

@@IceMetalPunk This is like claiming that the various inventors of calculators didn't ever use it to calculate anything, or that the inventors of early computers like Z3 or ENIAC didn't themselves ever come up with any programs for it. Or like saying the inventors of the C programming language never wrote any C programs, etc. Which would all be _completely_ ridiculous.

[@IceMetalPunk]

@@cube2fox What? How is it like that at all? Babbage and Lovelace worked together on the development of the Difference Engine. It was a collaboration. When Lovelace wrote the paper detailing the algorithmic implementation, Babbage wasn't even finished building the machine yet. I never said Babbage never programmed it, I said Lovelace wrote the *first* program for it.

[@cube2fox]

@@IceMetalPunk I think Lovelace didn't work on Babbage's computer. Never heard of such a claim.

[@damientonkin]

My father told me that his mother who was a very quiet woman would occasionally say things like "that's not right" when they were watching a war movie. Her husband would say "what are you talking about, I was there!" and it would just be sort of whatever you say dear. Much later we found out what she did during the war... at McArthur's headquarters.

[@TroyBierkortte]

The Bombe machine was mechanically analogous to a cash register. The American version of Bletchley, which used Turing’s technology, was the National Cash Register factory in Dayton, Ohio.

[@ilirlluka6789]

Hollywood has always had a bad habit of ALWAYS presenting smart people, a.k.a. "nerds", as being, on one hand clumsy autistic cartoonish virgins, and on the other hand extreme antisocial self-entitled assholes. Have your cake and eat it too why don't you. It clearly shows how these writters / producers can be so detached from the reality of being smart in real-life that they end-up imagining cartoonish characters who fortunately are not at all like that in real life. I mean c'mon. That is the reason why I deeply hate and despise shows like "The Big Bang Theory" or "Sherlock", the latter apparently being the acting template that Cumberbatch pulls out of his sleeve every time he has to play a smart person borderlining on genius. Not only they misrapresent intelligence but they apparently don't understand eccentrism and introvertion either. I mean, ok I get it when you have fantasy characters, but how could they not get it right in regards to real people such as for example John Nash in "The Beautiful Mind" or Alan Turing in "The Imitation Game", and fail to such a degree? [Ok granted, Rusell Crowe did a better job as he at least tried to be more delicate, more reserved in his portrayal of Nash. He did not dial "nerdness" up to 5000 and make a parody of it. In overall he did a better job in his acting, he was mostly limited by the poor writting]. And as for Turing, it's a shame because he was a promising individual who was just at the beginning of his discoveries and who knows how much deeper he could've impacted for the better the world in which we live and take for granted. They did not do him any favors in life and they are not doing to him any after death and I do not like the fact that Benedict Cumberbatch seems so pleased and proud with his portrayal of Turing.

[@3Max]

The truth is that the writers and producers aren't detached from reality. In fact, they're so connected to reality that they know what the vast majority of the public want to see, and they make money doing it.

[@DamianQualshy]

I fail to see what's the issue with Cumberbatch's Holmes in the show

[@FrenchCanadianGuy]

Actually, the purpose is probably more to project the archetype of the "asshole smart person" in everyone's psyche. The writters do it for their own reasons, as detached and antisocial as they themselves are, but the financing behind that repetitive archetype's presence in Hollywood movies comes from another goals : Make people suffer, so they consume to cope. It also project the archetypenon a lot of smart people who actually think "that's how intelligent people should behave". Not every high IQ individual took the time to make their EQ as strong. Tldr : It's basically a huge trap in the culture.

[@IceMetalPunk]

Hollywood has the same issue with its depiction of atheists. Either you get the assholes like Dr. House, or the "detached from emotions and pop culture" like Dr. Temperance Brennan. But that is an overlap of the problem you mention: fiction often portrays an unrealistic separation between emotions and intelligence. The smarter a character is, the more aloof and detached from society they are; and vice-versa, there's often an "emotional savior" character that tries to "help them connect" with their Normal Intelligence EQ Abilities™ (Wilson in House, Booth in Bones, etc.) As much as I loved Fringe, they *really* dug into that terrible trope towards the end with the Observers, revealing (spoiler alert for a years-old show) that they "made themselves so smart, they lost their emotional connections". And don't get me started on the stereotypes of *every main character* in The Big Bang Theory. (Oh, yeah, they have the "emotional savior" character, too, in Penny!) I think it's a pretty damaging trope, to be honest: it makes people distrust intelligence and actively *want* to avoid learning, for fear they'll become just as detached or douchey. It makes people think they have to choose between emotions or intelligence -- and who would ever want to be smart if it means they can't love? We definitely need more human portrayals of smart character in popular media. Honestly, one of my favorite Smart Person characters was Toby Curtis in the show "Scorpion"... which is sad, because that show had *terrible* writing overall 😂But he was at least human and not just a stereotype, while also being intelligent and an expert in his field.

[@christianbarnay2499]

@@3Max "they know what the vast majority of the public want to see" Some highly marketed movies that ended up being huge flops tend to disprove this. And so do some other movies ending up being huge successes through spectator's recommendations despite the producers making no efforts at all because they didn't believe in them. Major Hollywood producers know above all the unofficial rulebook which indicates that all movies must include a well known set of stereotypical scenes even if half of them make absolutely no sense in the context of the story the movie is trying to tell. They are ready to ruin a nice and consistent scenario and script just so they have their complete list of pet peeve scenes. The point in this video about creating an antagonist with Commander Denniston is one of those examples. They insult that officer's memory by portraying him as a petty bureaucrat who understands nothing at maths while he was in reality a codebreaker himself with great knowledge of state of the art cryptology. the only reason for that is they wanted their "antagonist chief that represents incompetent petty hierarchy that slows down the genius efforts always asking for immediate results while the genius is working on something bigger". This is a deviation of our post-industrial society where money is the alpha and omega of everything. This wasn't the case during WWII. Truth is their hierarchy was fully aware of the importance of all this and did everything financially and physically to ensure the cryptology team had everything they needed. Of course they kept track of payments in accounting books. That doesn't mean they contested every single demand.

[@koenth2359]

4:41 "Sitting at a desk for dozens of hours every day." I hope that's only two dozen hours...

[@Alex-cw3rz]

I think it was also a disservice to not talk about Tommy Flowers who actually designed and built Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic computer. Furthermore the fact it's 12 guys in a shed, whereas it was actually hundreds, even in the low thousands. Obviously the skipping over of the poles original cracking of engima before the rotor change is another disservice.

[@NoisqueVoaProduction]

It is yet to come a good Mathematician's movie with proper Math consultants. I mean, for the Queen's Gambit they were able to get Garry Kasparov as a consultant... I would love to see Math influencers being invited as consultants for these movies. They would do a great deal of good for them.

[@AnotherRoof]

@@NoisqueVoaProduction x+y is pretty good!

[@andrewkarsten5268]

How the heck does James never age???

[@markcrowther6953]

I've read a bit about Bletchley Park and Alan Turing over the years, I'm not an expert by any means. I'm also a chess fan and knew a bit about the chess players who were there too. Harry Golombek who died in 1995 was there and tried to write a book, he wasn't allowed. I was pleased to see the film was free for me to watch on Amazon Prime. I did not make it to anywhere near the end, I was enfuriated with many of the plot points being so obviously stupid. I can't remember having quite such a feeling since "Pawn Sacrifice" a fictionalized film about Bobby Fischer's life and chess career. That also just made things up for no reason, in some cases making the story less interesting than it actually was. I quit that film about 30 minutes in. The Codebreaker: The Alan Turing Story is a documentary on Amazon Prime but with some recreations and was so much better. Thanks for this great video.

[@Chombiee]

Oh wow very excited to see this. Is it your first collab? I discovered you first when you did that Fermat Descartes video, so really looking forward to more maths history

[@AnotherRoof]

Last November I did one with Tom Rocks Maths, and I have another maths history video in the pipeline!

[@thargy]

As someone who grew up inspired by Turing - who was always a hero to me - The Imitation Game was simply heartbreaking. I can’t understand why filmmakers are so incapable of finding the drama in the incredible reality that they have to create such false narratives. As James said, Turing deserved so much better than this, yet we let him down AGAIN.

[@ahobimo732]

As you noted, it's fascinating how Turing was able to foresee so much of the subsequent technological development. He was thinking about issues that were still a century away! What really blows my mind is that he worked this all out on a PURELY THEORETICAL level! He was NOT a "computer scientist" (or a scientist of any kind). He was a mathematician and logician. His only experiments were "thought experiments". So with nothing more than (at most) a pencil and pepper, he predicted the inevitable rise of artificial intelligence at a time when only 1 in 10 people owned a telephone. Let that sink in. AND he helped defeat the Nazis. And then the British government forced him to undergo chemical castration, which caused him to commit suicide. That's why I'm an anarchist. Power is always disgusting. But I digress... Rest in peace, Mr. Turing. You deserved so much better. 😔

[@Waffle_6]

does james grime age or does he just stay in his mid 20s forever

[@Ozymandi_as]

Not forever. Probably to so me time in his mid 50s when one day, without any obvious changes, he will suddenly look a spry 70, which will then be his appearance until he dies at the age of 127.

[@CharlesVanNoland]

I read a biography on Alan Turing a long while back called "The Man Who Knew Too Much" and that was how I'd originally come to admire the man and his accomplishments and ideas. A decade or so later, when I finally got around to watching The Imitation Game, I felt like the film didn't do the life and achievements of Turing anywhere near as much justice as was deserved.

[@saoirsedeltufo7436]

I'm with you, it's not only deeply offensive but also just a bad film! It also bizarrely feels like offensive autism representation for a person we have zero evidence was autistic - like Cumberbatch or the film team saw he was a mathematician, just assumed autistic from that and then barely bothered to research autism

[@fahrenheit2101]

I can't find any consensus online as to whether people think he was autistic, but I wouldn't say there was zero evidence. Seems up for debate.

[@brussels13207]

I have read a biography of Turning written by his mother. Don’t remember title but it is definitely work a read.

[@Myndale]

Thanks for making this video, the movie's script treatment of Commander Alastair Denniston in particular really bugged me, I didn't know anything about the man when I first watched it but realized he was obviously a national hero (a fact I quickly confirmed afterwards). The way the movie portrayed him was incredibly disrespectful. On a somewhat-less-important note, I cannot imagine any cryptanalyst familiar with Enigma (specifically, Hugh Alexander) stating that the number of combinations was 159 million million million "if you want be exact about it", knowing full well that the actual number was 158,962,555,217,826,360,000.

[@maverickstclare3756]

Chris is the spirit of his close friend Christopher Morcom, Alan talks about him in his 1932 essay "Nature of Spirit"

[@WolfPhoenix-is9wn]

我已經愛上了這個視頻，因為你成功地表達了你對圖靈和恩尼格瑪密碼破譯團隊的歪曲的失望，同時也認識到媒體可以做得多麼好。

[@z-beeblebrox]

10:50 One thing I couldn't help notice about the Based On A True Story list that probably helps Imitation Game keep its title: no "Pearl Harbor" anywhere to be found. XD

[@jelenahegser445]

in the state theatre of Nürnberg, Germany there was a play about tourings life, his homosexuality, chemical castration and suicide. it did not fokus much on the math, but was really emotianal. can recomand it!

[@muzinaughty544]

When I first saw the film I loved it and kinda inspired me to gain some knowledge about enigma and Christopher later I came to know he never named his any creation or computer not only that his whole character was wrongly portrayed the scenes during the war that bar scene I had questions earlier while watching the movie that there's a world war going on and they are chillin... But after completing the movie when I went on Google for a bit research I came to all of that was a lie I was devastated and so heartbroken because it was after a very very long time that something has really touched my soul

[@geoffstrickler]

Thank you for having James on the channel, he’s such a fun, and passionate maths communicator. Great fit for your channel. BTW, really great channel, I haven’t been a subscriber for long having just found the channel in the last few months, but I subscribed after seeing one or two of your vids, they’ve all been interesting, informative, and well done. And, I agree, it was an entertaining film, but it was not a great film. Just way too many flaws in how they told the story.

[@javen9693]

They shouldve just let Dr. Grime play Turing

[@myamacke4159]

0:25 What an amazing coincidence! While I always loved maths, that enigma machine video was what got me hooked and inspired me to pursue mathematics! Edit: I see that this was less of a coincidence than I realized! I commented this as soon as I heard that moment lol.

[@jasonsteverson4609]

You can compare it to early pinball machines not having pcbs. The acronym is EM.... Electro-Mechanical.

[@ianmccullough1084]

0:39 Certainly beats having your signature video be The Parker Square!

[@codycbradio]

I'd like to see a video talking about the accuracy of the movie enigma with Dougray Scott.

[@awandererfromys1680]

_The Imitation Game_ is such a character assassination imho, it's frustrating.

[@petrosthegoober]

A wild singing banana appears!

[@tullochgorum6323]

Another key element the film gets wrong is the scale of the effort at Bletchley. It wasn't a handful of boffins in a Nissen hut - it expanded to the point that it involved 10,000 people.

[@jorgechavesfilho]

Great video!

[@jamesdecross1035]

Question: what do you make of the earlier film of "Enigma", based on the book by Robert Harris?

[@Neko_Necromancer]

Yoooooo, it's James Grimeeeeee!

[@scaredyfish]

Have folks seen ‘Breaking The Code’, a made for TV movie based on the play of the same name, starring Sir Derek Jacobi as Alan Turing who had played the role on stage. I haven’t seen it since the 90s when it came out, but I recall enjoying it quite a bit.

[@Richardincancale]

18:33 Interesting choice of anthropomorphised name - Christopher. One of his boyhood friends, probably lover, was Christopher Strachey a very underrated computer scientist who was later professor at Oxford.

[@RobertBrzoza14]

Maybe ad this video to the second playlist MAFS - I almost missed it...

[@knight_kazul]

Does anyone know what the outro music is?

[@tekvax01]

Please talk about the purple code next!!! :)

[@Akio-fy7ep]

What offended me most is that, in reality, Poles did the heavy lifting. Brits built and operated the huge array of "bombes" invented by Poles and used at the beginning of the effort. Turing worked out Colossus to solve the tougher naval Enigma after they had been decrypting the simpler stuff for a long time. They also don't mention that the Friedmans in D.C. routinely decrypted hundreds of Enigma messages, mostly from agents in South America, without the help of bombes. Little reported is that the Germans cracked all the ciphers used by the Allies. The Germans were unable to use the results because the various agencies within the German government who broke various ciphers didn't talk to one another or to the people who needed the decryptions, because they were jockeying for power.

[@Alex-cw3rz]

Your second paragraph is just not true at all, for one D-days deception would have failed then and they would have beefed up Normandy, yet even after the allies had landed on the beach they thought the real attack would land in Calais. Germany didn't know they had machines to crack engima quicker than they could translate it themsleves. Secondly Italy was better at code breaking than Germany. Germany had a quite significant drop in information after Italy surrendered. Now if they solved ever cipher ever, why did that happen... Not to mention in the end the allies copied the Engima however changed it to not have the flaw of not repeating the letter and Germany didn't even know they'd done that. The irony that you were upset they spread misinformation and spread your own is very ironic. Also Tommy Flowers deisgned and built Colossus.

[@RedwoodRhiadra]

The Polish Bomba only worked up to 1940, after which the Germans made changes to Enigma's procedures which largely ended the Polish versions ability to decrypt traffic. Turing designed a largely *new* version, the Bombe which was both much faster and worked with the German's more secure procedures. (Including the naval Enigma). Elizabeth Friedman broke the earliest versions of Enigma version by hand - so did the Polish, before they invented the bomba to greatly speed up the process. Colosuss had nothing to do with any version of Enigma, and Turing didn't work on it at all. Colossus was designed by a team lead by Bill Tutte for the purpose of breaking the *Lorenz* cipher used by high command. As far as is known, there are several Allied ciphers that the Germans never cracked, SIGABA is one of them. Seriously, you're about as accurate as The Imitation Game.

[@2adamast]

@@RedwoodRhiadra With the new naval enigma the US "designed a largely new version, the Bombe which was both much faster and worked with the German's more secure procedures." For naval Enigma the UK used outsourced Bombe

[@sloth_6333]

Sorry for not being on topic but you are a gem of a youtuber, massive respect

[@tikaanipippin]

No mention of the great dilemma the film brought home - "now we know what is going to happen (to our convoys etc.), why we can't act on the immediate intelligence because the enemy will realize that we have broken their code system" - how can we leverage our intelligence?

[@mienzillaz]

Wielkim niedopatrzeniem jest pominięcie polskiego udziału. To my złamaliśmy ten kod, a film poświęcił na to kilka sekund. Rozumiem, że film to fikcja, i dlatego trafia na śmietnik.

[@macronencer]

James, great idea about Daniel Radcliffe. I think you're right, he could have been great.

[@zounds14]

They didn't mention the contribution from Marian Rejewski and the other Polish codebreakers.

[@Ludvigvanamadeus]

The film did allude to them briefly twice: 1) that they received the captured Enigma machine from the Polish intelligence service 2) when Turing first presents the idea for the cryptographic bombs, he says it's supposed to be an improved version of the machines built by Polish cryptographers

[@scene2much]

I like that! Line- let me try and we'll know for sure won't we. With a modest amount of indirection he is saying if it can be solved I shall solve it. So his😅 dramatization is if self-assured character. I've met geniuses who laugh or amuse themselves and through problem solving and some who Free but seldom bond James Bond type

[@dipi71]

I agree with the verdict at the end: what a missed opportunity. That Harry Potter actor as Alan Turing would have worked well also, I imagine. Cheers!

[@Robi2009]

Instant like for Dr. Grime 👍🏻

[@DavidLewis-v4m]

I have 2 main problems with the movie. 1. They don't discuss how the machine ACTUALLY breaks Enigma, which is deeply fascinating when you see how it's done. The worst part is that Alan Turing builds the entire damn machine first then after it doesn't work for days and days he finally stumbles upon the idea that words are repeated in the messages, when the truth is the fact that words repeat is the ENTIRE POINT of the machine. It was built to run a known text attack. The whole movie solution is backwards. 2. Just a silly little point, but the movie is named "The Imitation Game" but they never once mention the Turing Test which is based on THE IMITATION GAME! Why name the movie that then not tell anyone why? How many people would like to see an ACCURATE movie about Alan Turing and company genuinely breaking Enigma?

[@cerutek]

Maybe it is too complicated and too political for the 100% true film? Are all the documents about it declassified yet, anyway? There's sth about the beginning of crackling Enigma.

[@robertbutsch1802]

The real Alan Turing provided the mathematical foundations for computing by machine and first presented the concept of uncomputable functions. This completely overshadows in importance his work on code breaking.

[@doctorscoot]

I also question why the contributions of the Polish intelligence cryptography department - they figured out the basics and produced the first _bomba_

[@kurtlee3198]

he was known to go abroad where he could meet other men, somebody that anti social would have never been able to do that, so he clearly was pretty competent socially

[@crossiqu]

Which are the 4 movies in the board at the Verdict? I can only recognize 'PI' and 'Cube'....

[@Yugurta85]

A Beautiful Mind (about John Nash) and X + Y (purely fictional; about a teenager selected for maths international olympiad).

[@eonasjohn]

Thank you for the video.

[@stephenkrauss8240]

It's not about the accuracy is about the story for most people.

[@devpoodle]

Yay James Grime!

[@danielalejandrofernandez180]

You have to do Oppenheimer next :P

[@joinedupjon]

The film showed Turing having a paddy about some decrypted information that was relevant to a colleages brother because the nazis would realize enigma had been cracked... But there were other people at bletchley whos job it was to worry about that sort of thing - turing wasnt responsible for making that sort of decision, the film made it look like he was managing everything at bletchley. Theres a book called the ultra secret about the careful way the decrypted information had to be handled and used and iirc it doesn't mention Turing's name once - the guys deciding on the 'opsec' were in a different compartment.

[@erumaaro6060]

You could say that "Imitation Game" did a poor job at living up to it's name...

[@allstarwoo4]

As an American who is less aware of Alan Turing. To my limited understanding movie did get a lot of the important details right. Turing made the bombe machine to crack the enigma machine. Which in it's self was helped by the Nazi's using "H*il H*tler." Then the tragedy of Turing being chemically castrated for being gay. And then then his suicide due to chemical castration. And the post humorous knighting of Turing are all very important details they shouldn't mess up. Outside of British mathematics Turing has a reputation of being peculiar. The story of Turing's mug chained to the radiator didn't help. And let's be honest here we all know someone who's incredibly smart but they do things differently for some reason. So as an American the inaccuracies don't bother me that much because it's not well known enough. The movie that did piss me off about inaccuracies is "Radioactive." Multiple Nobel prize scientist Marie Curie. They made her out to be a lost, grief stricken, window. While these were technically true she basically worked until the radiation poisoning killed her. Maybe it's the part of me that wanted to be a scientist but you don't disrespect the person who started a new branch of chemistry that would go on to save lives through x rays and chemo therapy. I think I'm less mad about Turing's inaccuracies because there are so many British mathematicians who know better that are willing to fight tooth and nail for Turing.

[@joinedupjon]

In terms of getting into a characters head without inventing phoney antagonists to argue with - its possible. There was a channel 4 series called undeclared war that did this with computer hackers. when they were hacking the would be shown in a sort of dream sequence climbing a mountain or solving some sort of other physical problem and feeling exhillarated when they got to the top only to see that there was another problem to solve... Or they'd just hit a dead end and had to backtrack. Seems to me that showing what it feels like for characters to be working on some challenging abstract problem in that sort of way is superior... Beautiful Mind was a bit like that too iirc even if it got a lot of stuff wrong.

[@parthsavyasachi9348]

For me the worst part of the movie was where the woman tells him that her counterpart always starts the same thing and somehow that was eureka moment. Lady the message is encrypted and text that you see shall be different everyday. That's how that machine worked. They figured out eventually that things in start repeat but that was not because everyday some woman saw same text.

[@TrumpeterOnFire]

Yeah I agree, why is their leader the antagonist? Surely _the war_ and _the germans_ if not _the code_ are the antagonist?

[@harriehausenman8623]

Oi lads! That singing banana's back on the telly!! 🤠 🎶 🍌

[@aaronfleisher4694]

The British Bombe (and its Polish predecessors) were computers. These were not universal computers, which one can consider as fully programmable.

[@toma3025]

At the risk of voicing an unpopular opinion here, I think the reason why they portrayed Turing the way the did in the film is pretty obvious - the actor. Benedict Cumberbatch always plays some small variation on the same character in essentially every single movie/drama he's cast in: some kind of brilliant/maverick genius, that is very much aware of his superior intellect/power and has to display it at every opportunity. (Clearly), some people find this kind of character very entertaining and believable - I personally do not. But it is what it is and I suspect the portrayal in the Imitation Game likely had a lot to do with this.

[@jamesrivettcarnac]

1:09 i forgot about the army one! I always just remember the Navy one...

[@attribute-4677]

Maybe you both could do a documentary about it all with 100% truths?? I’d watch it!

[@zzzzzzz8473]

i quite enjoyed it , but yea the affectations and stereotypes were a bit over the top . the worst offending trope to me is the singular "eureka" moment of using known parts of the message , which in the film is suddenly realized after talking in a bar . its such a terrible trope that downplays everyone's work , and how in real science its the contribution of thousands of incremental findings and important failures that lead to success . i did however like their twist on "the turing test" of humanity being about the moral dilemma of purposely NOT saving all the allies because it would have revealed that they had broken the code , that harsh acceptance of rationality to save more overall .

[@andrewlast9960]

I have seen 3 films about Alan Turing 1 was a BBC documentary i believe

[@harriehausenman8623]

Mr. Grimes lookin' SHARP! ☺

[@2000bvz]

With just the littlest understanding of the real history around the breaking of the Enigma, this movie drove me absolutely nuts! Even if it was just for dramatic effect, the movie fell down for me. The fact that they completely misrepresented the actual people and basically messed up the actual (and very interesting in itself) history is crazy making.

[@Dean-fh8me]

The duo we all needed🎉🎉

[@FrankHarwald]

? I don't see any link to your sponsor anywhere on the video, nor in its description. Did you forget it?

[@JeremyHelm]

Why no link to the guest in the description?

[@JeremyHelm]

Did I miss it?

[@AnotherRoof]

@@JeremyHelm Yeah the link is to the numberphile Enigma video