The Imitation Game

November 30, 2014

(Credit: The Weinstein Company)

Released in theaters in the U.S. on Friday (Nov. 28) and in the UK on Nov. 14, The Imitation Game portrays the race by Alan Turing and his team of code-breakers to crack the German Enigma machine code at Britain’s top-secret Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park during World War II.

The title of the film refers to Turing’s proposed eponymous test discussed in his seminal 1950 paper on AI entitled Computing Machinery and Intelligence, which considered the question, “Can machines think?”

The film, which won the “People’s Choice Award for Best Film” at the Telluride Film Festival, features Turing’s design of the bombe machine, designed to discover some of the settings of the Enigma machines on the German military networks: specifically, the set of rotors in use and their positions in the machine.

According to Wikipedia, “An Enigma machine was any of a family of related electro-mechanical rotor cipher machines used in the twentieth century for enciphering and deciphering secret messages. …

The bombe (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

“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.

“German military texts enciphered on the Enigma machine were first broken by the Polish Cipher Bureau, beginning in December 1932. … From 1938 onwards, additional complexity was repeatedly added to the Enigma machines, making decryption more difficult.”

So during the war, to decrypt a vast number of messages enciphered on Enigma, Turing’s team of cryptologists developed the bombe, also featured in the film, an elaborate electromechanical device. The working rebuilt bombe at Bletchley Park museum used rotating drums to simulate the action of an Enigma rotor. There are 36 Enigma-equivalents and on the right-hand end of the middle row, three indicator drums.


The Weinstein Company | The Imitation Game — Official Trailer HD