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by heurisko 1737 days ago
I watched the "Imitation Game" and read the biography of Turing by Andrew Hodges.

What I found fascinating about the biography was recognising what Turing was describing in theoretical terms, as actual hardware and software concepts today. I know some parts are somewhat obvious, but it was still nice to trace the concepts back to excerpts from his work.

The Imitation Game is a nice fiction, but doesn't portray Turing as having very much agency, in comparison to the real Turing. I think the fictional and real-life characters were completely different.

1 comments

The Imitation Game is awful and should never be screened.
It is a good movie. It introduced Turing to the masses in a compassionate way. Also it showed normal people that cryptography, despite being rather boring and mathy, is extremely important in everyday life.

I also enjoyed Breaking the Code – https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115749/

I would agree that is an enjoyable movie but also terrible history - but then most movies that deal with historical events are wildly inaccurate - usually for fairly understandable reasons.

I was lucky enough to see the stage version of Breaking the Code - Derek Jacobi was outstanding:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyDe8IWAxaY&t=168s