Engelsk

The Imitation Game

Questions about the movie

Bletchley Park was the most important site, when referring to British codebreaking and decryption during World War 2. The workers were great mathematicians, codebreakers and some of the best strategical thinkers in Great Britain. Their job was to decrypt German messages, which were written in code, using the Enigma machine.

Alan Turing was a British professor in mathematics, born on the 23^rd of June, 1912. He is known for being the creator of early computers, and during World War 2, he build Christopher, a machine that was able to break the German Enigma codes. His childhood was marked by his urge to be the smartest in school. He was bullied heavily, both for his social difficulties and for his lack of linguistic skills. He was openly homosexual, and this would end up killing him. He married a woman called Joan Clark, who helped Turing with building his machine and understanding the Enigma. The relationship didn’t work out because of his sexuality, and after the machine was done and the war was over, he got 2 choices. Either he would spend 2 years in prison, or go through a hormone treatment with estrogen injections. He couldn’t stand the pressure, and in 1954 he was found dead by his housekeeper. He had eaten an apple injected with cyanide, a death inspired by his favorite movie, Snow White and the seven dwarfs. 

Joan Elisabeth Lowther Murray was one of the few people in Britain, who were able to solve the mystery behind the Enigma codes. She solved the crosswords that Alan Turing put in the newspaper as the only woman. She made the final cut, and was able to help Turing and the others with building the Turing machine, Christopher. She had a hidden role in her job, but she might be the one who cracked the codes. She was married to Alan Turing, but the relationship didn’t work. She later married Lieutenant-Colonel John Kenneth Ronald Murray.

The machine that Alan Turing build was called Christopher, because Turing’s closest (and only) friend during school was called Christopher. He was the only person who was able to understand his urges to learn more, especially including codebreaking. Even Christopher was interested in decrypting, and the two boys bonded over this topic. Turing seemed to be falling in love with Christopher, and this is probably where his homosexuality started to develop. When the students returned after a vacation, Turing was informed that Christopher had passed away.

The Imitation Game´s plot is a true story. Although some aspects or clips from the movie aren’t exactly what happened, the movie should still be considered made on the known facts about the codebreakers at Bletchley Park.

Translations

Decryption – afkodning, dekryptering

Enigma – gåde

Prodigy – vidunderbarn, vidunder

Mediocrity – middelmådighed

An odd duck – sær/specielt individ, anderledes

A puff – homosexuel, en der opfører sig homosexuelt

Brigade – hærafdeling

Crew – mandskab, hold, gruppe

Manual – brugervejledning

Stigma – Stigmatisering

Saucy – næsvis, frisk

During – I løbet af

Essay

Even though the Enigma machine got known during World War 2, it was actually invented years before the war even started. The first few drafts of the Enigma machine, made by Arthur Scherbius, were released in 1919. After finishing the machine, he started a company in Berlin, and in 1923 the first commercial Enigma machine was put to production. Already a few years after the production started, the German army began to buy the machines, and not just a few. The army bought over 500 machines, but sadly some of them didn’t work properly. Soon after, every Nazi organization began using the Enigma machine to code their messages. They used the codes for everything, even the weather forecast. It is believed that the Italians and Spanish used the Enigma machines too, but only some of the first versions. This decision ended up making the Germans lose the war, because the British learned to decode the Enigma messages.

The British were responsible for breaking the code. It wasn’t an easy task, and it took some of Great Britain’s greatest thinkers and a professor in mathematics to finally solve the mystery of the German Enigma machine. It was a complicated process, but electronic data process decoding is much easier today. The computers that we use today are somewhat like the Enigma machines. When we search something on Google, it takes a lot of processing and decoding for the computer to exactly take you to the side or information you were searching for. Looking for patterns in text or figures, breaking down codes and finding the corresponding information is just some of the factors, that modern technology has to do. Another example of modern data processing is personal codes and logins. Many of us like to keep some of our information private, and to keep it that way, we use usernames and passwords. When we log on to sites like Facebook or other sorts of user based accesses, the computer has to search through the complex systems, to make sure that the right account is available and brought to the user. If this process didn’t work, we wouldn’t be able to retrieve the data that we wanted, or we could be logged onto someone else’s account. This could mean that information would be leaked to people, who doesn’t have the rights to see it.

This process isn’t just used on private computers, or narrowed down to social media. It is heavily used in the army, or other sorts of national data bases. For every bite of easy available data and publicly open sources, there are thousands of military secrets hidden away. Some of them could be protecting us from information that could harm our society, or change the way that we look at things. This is why our modern electronic data processing coding and decoding systems are so important. Although these systems are heavily protected against intruders, some are still able to hack their way through the firewalls. Because of this, a lot of private or secret data and information is leaked every year. We’ve seen cases of credit card information being leaked to companies or private hackers, and by retrieving this data, their able to actually use the credit cards and take away the money. Some cases are more severe than others. There’s a big difference to a social security number leak, and a leak of important military information. Both cases are unacceptable, and this shouldn’t be something that’s possible to day anyways.

As mentioned earlier, the Enigma machine was a complex system. It was made with both electrical and mechanical components. The machine could be called a rotor machine, based on the design of the actual decoding and decryption. A keyboard, rotating disks and different stepping components make up the Enigma machine’s basic design. The rotors are supposed to turn, every time a key is pressed on the keyboard. This is possible due to an electric current, flowing through both the mechanical and electric components. When the keys are pressed, the current turns the rotors in different directions, creating a new configuration for each letter. When the keys are pressed, the current also lights up the next letter on the keyboard, creating the specific codes. Therefore, it was difficult to decipher the machine’s codes. Each day, the currents were changed, making the codes only last one day. Only a few signs gave away the codes. The Germans always finished their messages with “Heil Hitler”. When the workers at Bletchley Park discovered this, they recoded the Turing machine to look for this combination of letters. They ended up finding the right setting, and from that day on, they were able to decrypt the German Enigma machine.

 When the code was finally broken, the allies knew that they couldn’t use their advantages. If they suddenly started ruining secret German missions or attacks, they would know that they had cracked the Enigma code. If that was the case, the machine would be recoded and the hard work would be wasted. They had to hide the fact that they now knew what the coded messages said. When they had kept the secret long enough, they started using the information that they knew to prepare for the attacks. By doing this, the German forces wouldn’t get suspicious. After some time, the preparations got bigger and bigger, and at this point the allies were able to use the messages to make their own missions and attacks. They won the war, and experts say that breaking the Enigma code shortened the war by at least 2 years. It had a huge impact on the outcome, and millions of lives were spared.