From: Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> To: math-fun@mailman.xmission.com Subject: [math-fun] "The Imitation Game" -- review Message-ID: <E1Y6NNI-0006Lv-1l@elasmtp-kukur.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Yesterday, I was dragged, kicking & screaming, to The Imitation Game by my wife.

It was extremely painful to watch this movie, and I've been having a hard to trying to figure out why.

Perhaps the best analogy would be a movie about Mozart by someone who was born deaf. No matter what anyone told this deaf movie-maker about Mozart's music, it would always be completely foreign hearsay, and could never convey Mozart's musical genius to someone who does know & love Mozart's work. ("Amadeus", of course, is the complete opposite, as it was made by people who really, really enjoyed & understood Mozart's music.)

Turing's life was totally tied up in his head, and he must have spent an hour or two running every day as his form of mental yoga (his marathon running times were world-class, and you can't keep that level of fitness without running at least one or two hours per day). Although the movie shows him running, the movie completely misunderstands the point of his running -- it is time alone when he can contemplate & work out some of his theories. "Aspies" like Turing find too much external stimulation painful and distracting,

--The whole notion Turing had Asperger syndrome, likely was made up / exaggerated by the makers of this movie, I do not think there is evidence for it. Anyway the two book bios of him, do not claim he had Asperger. He apparently did have a minor speech problem something like a stutter, which may have affected his sociality or lack thereof. It also has been popular, perhaps as part of an attempt to make Asperger-afflicted people feel better by association, to claim that e.g. Mozart, Einstein, Newton, Tesla had it. Well, maybe, but I'm dubious of such retrospective diagnoses. P.A.M.Dirac strikes me as quite likely, though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrospective_diagnoses_of_autism

so Turing's marathon runs were a welcome respite against this unwanted external stimulation. "I have such a stressful job that the only way I can get it out of my mind is by running hard; its the only way I can get some release."

Perhaps a key point that The Imitation Game wanted to make, but really screwed up, was the fact that mathematicians like Turing were so highly motivated by the challenge of the puzzle, that they wouldn't have worked any faster (or any slower) on solving the Enigma problem knowing that many, many lives were at stake. It isn't because Turing didn't care about people's lives; it's just that whether he cared or not wouldn't make any difference in how he attacked the problem. "Caring" in this context simply became another distraction to be ignored.

The Cairncross character is as completely gratuitous as it is unhistorical; there is no evidence that Cairncross ever even met Turing, much less worked with him. It is sad that The Imitation Game has to stoop to such low depths to find intrigue; Turing never made any secret about his homosexuality, and as a result, any attempt to blackmail him by threatening to out him would not have worked.

--well... I do not think Turing made a huge secret of it, but it obviously was not tremendously well known either, and in fact when it did become known to the wrong people, Turing paid heavily for that. So yes, he could in principle have been blackmailed. --there happen to be at least 2 book biographies of Turing, both pretty good, (by Andrew Hodges and by B Jack Copeland), as well as a "docudrama" about his life "Codebreaker, the sort of Alan Turing" on DVD, which, amazingly, I'm about to see tonight at some party.