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Discussion on: Alan Turing to Feature on New £50 Note

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evanoman profile image
Evan Oman • Edited

Great to see more public recognition of Turing's accomplishments.

For those who have only seen the film The Imitation Game, I highly recommend you check out the Turing biography by Hodges.

The movie goes beyond typical errors and makes some major mischaracterizations, as outlined here. Such a complicated, important figure deserves better than what the movie had to offer (no matter how entertaining it was).

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thefern profile image
Fernando B 🚀 • Edited

As a controls engineer the movie was portrayed so bad on the mechanical/electrical side, the movie attempted to portray Turing as the sole code breaker of Enigma. I forget which book I read, but the Polish actually did the first breakthroughs on the Enigma which Turing built upon. I don't think they would have ever broke the code without all the cribs military used like weather, dates, and military salutations.

The work to break enigma was written in blood by all the Polish code breakers, and there was a german spy in France which helped with supplementing the code books to Poland. The movie did a horrible job in research, sadly. Germany figured out about Poland's work, and created the new version of enigma with more rotating wheels, and patch cables to make it even harder.

Nevertheless Turing is one of my idols in computing I have a few books about him.