Alan Turing And The Imitation Game

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The movie titled “The Imitation Game” directed by Morten Tyldum is based on the true story of Alan MathisonTuring. This particular movie was inspired by the biographical book, “Alan Turing: The Enigma” written by Andrew Hodges. Alan Turing was a mathematician, cryptanalysis, and a well known war hero. In 1952, he worked at Bletchley Park, Britain’s code breaking center, during the Second World War. Subsequently, he cracked the Enigma, which is an electro mechanical rotor cipher machine that generates a new code every 24 hours, used by Nazi Germany. A year later, he also cracked Germany’s Naval Enigma, which was an even more complicated design than the Enigma. This shortened the period of the war by two years, which in turn, saved millions of lives. Unfortunately, Turing got arrested as he was exposed as a homosexual; this was seen as gross indecency at the time and was a punishable crime. As a result, instead of spending his time in prison and getting the Bombe confiscated from him, he decided to go through a series of treatment which consisted of injecting him with estrogen every month to get rid of his homosexual desires. This treatment did not give the wanted result but left Turing with awful side effects. Eventually, Turing committed suicide by eating an apple laced with Cyanide from his lab. Years later, he received a posthumous royal pardon from Queen Elizabeth II. (38, Hodges). Overall, this film mostly did not represent an accurate depiction of actual events.
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