THE IMITATION GAME

MARINELLE C. TUMANGUIL JUNE 13, 2019

BSMT-1A
Guide Questions:
1. During what time period is the movie “The Imitation Game” set?
 During World War II that Alan Turing tries to crack the German Enigma code
with help from fellow mathematicians.

2. What is enigma?
 The Enigma Machine was a cipher machine that was developed back in the 1920s.
It was meant to be a cipher device that would help in the transmission and
reception of classified messages in the political and business domain. However,
due to its brilliant ingenuity, it was used extensively during the second World War
by German armed forces in their military operations. the Enigma Machine is an
electromechanical device, which works through mechanical parts as an electric
current passes through it.

3. Why couldn’t they crack the machine just by having the machine?
 For a single encoded message, there are a total of 158,962,555,217,826,360,000
possible settings (in other words, it’s almost 159 million million million settings)
of the Enigma Machine, only one of which is correct! It also means that you have
to work through these many settings to find the one correct setting.

4. How was Turing’s approach (way of thinking) different than the others who were trying
to crack each message?
 Alan Turing introduced a theoretical contraption based on the principle that a
machine can emulate any machine: that is the so-called “Turing machine. If there
is any hope of getting machines to be “intelligent” the sense that their reasoning
and the results provided are indistinguishable from those of humans, these will be
some type of computer. And since compute operation is ultimately based on the
Turing machine model, I can say that Turing certainly was a forefather of
artificial intelligence.

5. What was the name of Alan Turing’s machine? Why did he pick that name?
 Turing named the machine “Christopher.” He named it after Turing’s first love.
Turing was obsessed with the idea of using a computer to engineer a human brain
or even a soul, and dubbing the computer “Christopher” makes it seem as if
Turing may be trying to find a way to resurrect his old love. In reality, the
machine was called the Bombe and nicknamed “Victory.”

6. Why was Alan Turing persecuted?

 Turing’s case is his conviction, sentencing and chemical castration for
homosexual offences led to his suspected suicide in 1954 and has been the subject
of considerable controversy ever since.
7. How Alan Turing’s invention was changed our lives today?
 He ended world war 2. Also, Turing changed our lives today by continued to
make significant contributions to computing until his death in 1954. Turing's
legacy is huge. We live in a world full of computers. By his machine that he
invented, Alan Turing is considered by many to be the father of modern computer
science as the world knows it. He formed the concept of the algorithms and
computations with one of his inventions and with his intelligible intelligent many
of the inventors today using his concepts to upgrade and making an invention.

8. Who was the main cast of the movie “Imitation Game”?

 Benedict Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch

9. The Enigma has five rotors and ten plug board cables. How many possible settings can it
have every single day?
 Encoded messages would be a particular scramble of letters on a given day that
would translate to a comprehendible sentence when unscrambled. When a key on
the keyboard is pressed, one or more rotors move to form a new rotor
configuration which will encode one letter as another. Current flows through the
machine and lights up one display lamp on the lamp board, which shows the
output letter. Each month, Enigma operators received codebooks which specified
which settings the machine would use each day. Every morning the code would
change. A plugboard is similar to an old-fashioned telephone switch board that
has ten wires, each wire having two ends that can be plugged into a slot.
 Rotor (or scrambler) arrangement: 2 — 3 —1. The Enigma machines came with
several different rotors, each rotor providing a different encoding scheme. In
order to encode a message, the Enigma machines took three rotors at a time, one
in each of three slots. Each different combination of rotors would produce a
different encoding scheme.

10. The two time Britain’s national chess champion who first led the unit to crack the
enigma.
 Hugh Alexander (played by Matthew Goode). Twice British chess champion, and
an International Master, he made important contributions to two classic chess
strategies: "the Dutch defence" and the "Petroff defence". Had he been allowed to
compete in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The authorities here thought
the contents of his brain too valuable to allow him to go anywhere near there he
may even have become a world champion. He also was known in print at
Bletchley as C.H.O'D – his full name was Conel Hugh O'Donel Alexander –
which sounds like a cryptic crossword clue.

11. What is Turing often called?

 Alan Turing is often called the father of modern computing. He was a brilliant
mathematician and logician. He developed the idea of the modern computer and
artificial intelligence. During the Second World War he worked for the
 government breaking the enemies code and Churchill said he shortened the war
by two years.

12. What were the letters that made the machine first work?
 The letters that made the machine first work were L, H,W,A,Q.

13. When did Alan Turing commit suicide?

 June 7 1954 by eating the apple with cyanide.

14. Turing’s important and indelible work and research called “Turing’s Test” became one
of the center of research after his death. This work was later highly developed as what we
call now_____.
 The Imitation Game

15. In the movie, the following quote is stated multiple times: “sometimes it’s the very
people who no one imagines anything of who the things can imagine.” In at least 2-3
paragraphs, write a reflection to this quote in light of Alan Turing. What did he imagine
that nobody else could?
 Sometimes it’s the very people who no one imagines anything of who the things
can imagine this means that every single one of us is born with different strengths
and a different purpose to fulfill in our life. Every single one of us is capable of
achieving amazing things. For me, I should never underestimate people and I
should never pre-judge another personal abilities because in life it is those I might
never expect that end up changing the world like Alan Turing, he proved it by
showing his intelligence to his boss and his coworkers and he found a way to
encode the German messages and the he stopped World War ll.