On my way to see The Imitation Game I vaccinated my expectations with a healthy dose of skepticism for a movie on a math hero, but this turned out to be too cautious.
The feature was no disappointment. Like most movies about science and math, this one, too, is more about
human relationships than the presumed subject matter. A poignant Alan Turing, troubled by his creative demons and his Aspergarian relational style sticks to your memory's ribs.
Some mild disappointment dawned on me after I realized (not without a modicum of research) the road the film indicated but did not take, a path that, if artfully pursued, could have turned this into a masterpiece.
Most of the movie narration appears to be a Turing test, where Alan
challenges a detective eager to prove he was a Soviet spy into playing
"the imitation game."
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
this was the test that Turing proposed in two versions in his 1950
paper titled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," and not the
movie's namesake.
While this sleight of extreme self-referentiality is brilliant, an
actual "imitation game" would have required three players and a judge,
all secluded from each other. If the detective was the judge, he
should not have faced the other player(s), for the goal of the game
was to tell them apart from machines.
This makes me only half-heartedly sold on this conceipt.
Let me mention the motifs that struck me:
Intolerance of diversity, especially exemplified by the aforementioned
bullying at the boarding school Alan attended as well as the injustice
of the British facade of decency.
The genius leaning on the shoulders of his collaborators and not only
his giant predecessors: Alan did not work in a vacuum, even his proud
and grand ego was compelled to accept the support of his former
rivals.
The forlorn adolescent love incarnating into The Machine: Poe's (and
Nabokov's!) Annabelle Lee meets Dr. Frankestein.
This is probably the most original facet of this feature.
The supreme historical irony that not only Hitler would be defeated
(also) by the hand of a gay man, but that the key step in breaking
Enigma would be the constant conclusion of certain messages with "heil
Hitler!"
Incidentally, this is the most math you will get from this movie: the
combinatorial fact that if you fix a subpattern into a universe of
patterns you cut the dimensions proportionally to the length of the
subpattern.
Perhaps precisely because this wasn't to be a documentary on Enigma or
Turing machines, but rather a biopic set against a difficult societal background
I think this film missed big time on the main subtext of the
original imitation game.
This stems from an all too human party game where a judge strives
to make out the gender of two unknown and invisible human players of
opposite sex. A machine then substitutes one of the players, but the
roles and aim stay the same.
I can't help thinking Turing, the historical Alan, was sublimating
his own predicament
when he formulated this poignant metaphor of gender identification and
of the moral obtuseness of society facing it!
Most of the movie narration appears to be a Turing test, where Alan
challenges a detective eager to prove he was a Soviet spy into playing
"the imitation game."
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
this was the test that Turing proposed in two versions in his 1950
paper titled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," and not the
movie's namesake.
While this sleight of extreme self-referentiality is brilliant, an
actual "imitation game" would have required three players and a judge,
all secluded from each other. If the detective was the judge, he
should not have faced the other player(s), for the goal of the game
was to tell them apart from machines.
This makes me only half-heartedly sold on this conceipt.
Let me mention the motifs that struck me:
Intolerance of diversity, especially exemplified by the aforementioned
bullying at the boarding school Alan attended as well as the injustice
of the British facade of decency.
The genius leaning on the shoulders of his collaborators and not only
his giant predecessors: Alan did not work in a vacuum, even his proud
and grand ego was compelled to accept the support of his former
rivals.
The forlorn adolescent love incarnating into The Machine: Poe's (and
Nabokov's!) Annabelle Lee meets Dr. Frankestein.
This is probably the most original facet of this feature.
The supreme historical irony that not only Hitler would be defeated
(also) by the hand of a gay man, but that the key step in breaking
Enigma would be the constant conclusion of certain messages with "heil
Hitler!"
Incidentally, this is the most math you will get from this movie: the
combinatorial fact that if you fix a subpattern into a universe of
patterns you cut the dimensions proportionally to the length of the
subpattern.
Perhaps precisely because this wasn't to be a documentary on Enigma or
Turing machines, but rather a biopic set against a difficult societal background
I think this film missed big time on the main subtext of the
original imitation game.
This stems from an all too human party game where a judge strives
to make out the gender of two unknown and invisible human players of
opposite sex. A machine then substitutes one of the players, but the
roles and aim stay the same.
I can't help thinking Turing, the historical Alan, was sublimating
his own predicament
when he formulated this poignant metaphor of gender identification and
of the moral obtuseness of society facing it!
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