[eigenket]

Personally I thought it was rather sad that it ignored completely the massive contribution made by the Polish Cipher Bureau and particularly Marian Rejewski.

In 1939 the Poles basically dumped an absolutely massive amount of information they had worked out about enigma on the British and the French. The Poles had a working system to decrypt enigma from (I think) 1932 up to 1939 when the Germans added more rotors to the machines increasing the complexity significantly. The Polish techniques still worked with the new rotors but the additional complexity slowed them down a lot.

I maybe remembering this incorrectly but I think the Poles managed to construct machines logically identical to enigma machines (i.e. the same output for every input) based just on messages they'd intercepted (without ever seeing an actual enigma machine). They gave one of these machines to the French and one to the British.

The "Bombe" built in Bletchly park was directly inspired by the Polish "Bomba" machines.

[tialaramex]

Right, when a large corporation bought one of my previous employers we used their more generous "team building" budget to take the software engineering team to Bletchley and one of the reasons was that two of our small (UK based) team were Polish and the Polish contribution on Enigma was so important. There's a little memorial to their work at the site.

I've never watched the movie, having also spent a bunch of time working with the Turing Archive's collection of his other work (he was really interested in morphogenesis, a corner of biology) as a side job when I was at postgraduate student I expect I'd just find the portrayal annoying.