Doing the things that no one can imagine

Alan Turing (1912–54) was a mathematician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. In his too-short life he laid the theoretical foundations of computing and artificial intelligence. He hypothesized—correctly, as experiments later confirmed—how otherwise undifferentiated organisms form limbs and other patterns. And during World War II, Turing was instrumental in breaking the Wehrmacht’s formidable Enigma codes.

Turing’s life is the subject of the new movie The Imitation Game , a more-or-less factual dramatization released today in the UK and on 28 November in the US. There is much to like about the movie. Playing Turing, Benedict Cumberbatch masterfully captures the man’s mathematical genius, social awkwardness, and intellectual arrogance while also evoking our sympathy. The art direction, cinematography, and costumes depict wartime and postwar Britain with persuasive verisimilitude.

The movie’s dramatic tension is richly multidimensional. Will Turing, who manifestly prefers to work alone, be able to work in a team? Will the team break the Enigma codes in time to forestall defeat and hasten victory? Will Turing and his team even be allowed to continue their machine-based approach in the face of managerial opposition?

In the service of entertainment, the makers of The Imitation Game inevitably commit some simplifications and elisions. The real team that tackled Enigma was bigger than the five-person movie version. Polish cryptanalysts did more than merely procure a captured Enigma machine for the British, as the movie suggests; they pioneered the electromechanical approach to decryption and had already broken an earlier, simpler version of the code.

One of the movie’s central points is embodied by a line spoken first by Christopher Morcom (Jack Bannon), who was Turing’s only friend at his posh private school, then by Turing himself, and finally by his fellow mathematician and cryptanalyst, Joan Clarke (Keira Knightly):

I won’t divulge the moving circumstances under which Clarke speaks the line, but its message is a general one: Genius like Turing’s has so much to contribute to society that the character quirks that may accompany it should be accepted and tolerated. That’s not to say that eccentricity is a necessary quality among geniuses. Although the list of eccentric physicists is long (Isaac Newton, Henry Cavendish, Paul Dirac . . . ), so too is the list of congenial physicists (Michael Faraday, Ernest Rutherford, Enrico Fermi . . . )

Turing’s homosexuality was not a quirk or flaw of character. And to its credit, the movie does not portray it as such. But throughout Turing’s lifetime, sex between consenting men was illegal in the UK. If the law had been repealed in 1952, when Turing died, and not 15 years later, Turing might have lived to witness and participate in the computer revolution that his work helped to spark.