The Imitation Game: Historical Figures of Cryptanalysis

The Imitation Game was released in the United Kingdom on 14 November 2014, and will be released theatrically in the United States on 28 November 2014. The film portrays the race against time by Alan Turing and his team of code-breakers at Britain's top-secret Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, during the darkest days of World War II. The motley group of scholars, mathematicians, linguists, chess champions and intelligence officers had a powerful ally in Prime Minister Winston Churchill who authorized the provision of any resource they required. The film spans the key periods of Turing's life: his unhappy teenage years at boarding school; the triumph of his secret wartime work on the revolutionary electro-mechanical bombe that was capable of breaking 3,000 Enigma-generated naval codes a day; and the tragedy of his post-war decline following his conviction for gross indecency, a now-outdated criminal offence stemming from his admission of maintaining a homosexual relationship.

As you can understand rating films is not in the scope of this blog, so we will deal with two of the characters that are legends in information security history.

Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch)

Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS  [Order of the British Empire] [Fellows of the Royal Society] (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was a British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, pioneering computer scientist, mathematical biologist, and marathon and ultra distance runner. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.

During World War II, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre. For a time he led Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including improvements to the pre-war Polish bombe method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. Winston Churchill said that Turing made the single biggest contribution to Allied victory in the war against Nazi Germany. Turing's pivotal role in cracking intercepted coded messages enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis in several crucial battles. It has been estimated that Turing's work shortened the war in Europe by as many as two to four years.

After the war, he worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he designed the ACE, among the first designs for a stored-program computer. In 1948 Turing joined Max Newman's Computing Laboratory at Manchester University, where he assisted development of the Manchester computers and became interested in mathematical biology. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis, and predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, first observed in the 1960s.

Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts, when such behaviour was still criminalised in the UK. died in 1954, 16 days before his 42nd birthday, from cyanide poisoning. An inquest determined his death a suicide; his mother and some others believed it was accidental. On 10 September 2009, following an Internet campaign, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for "the appalling way he was treated." The Queen granted him a posthumous pardon on 24 December 2013.

Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley)

Joan Elisabeth Lowther Murray, MBE [Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire] (née Clarke; 24 June 1917 – 4 September 1996) was an English cryptanalyst and numismatist. She worked as a code-breaker at Bletchley Park during World War II. Joan Elisabeth Lowther Clarke was born on 24 June 1917 in West Norwood, London, the youngest child of Dorothy (née Fulford) and the Rev William Kemp Lowther Clarke, a clergyman. She had three brothers and one sister.

She attended Dulwich High School for Girls in south London and won a scholarship to attend Newnham College, Cambridge where she gained double first degree in mathematics and was a Wrangler.

Clarke and fellow code-breaker Alan Turing became very good friends at Bletchley Park. Turing would arrange their shifts so they could be working together, as well as spending a lot of their free time together. In the spring of 1941, Turing proposed marriage to Clarke and subsequently introduced her to his family. After admitting his homosexuality to his fiancée, who was reportedly "unfazed" by the revelation, Turing decided that he could not go through with the marriage and he broke up with Clarke in the summer of 1941. After the war Clarke worked for GC&CS where she met Lieutenant-Colonel John Kenneth Ronald Murray and got married. Shortly after their marriage John Murray retired from GC&CS due to ill health and the couple moved to Crail in Scotland. They returned to work at GC&CS in 1962 where Clarke remained until 1977 when she retired aged 60.

Following her husband's death in 1986, Clarke moved to Headington, Oxfordshire, where she continued her research into coinage. During the 1980s she assisted Sir Harry Hinsley with the appendix to volume 3, part 2 of British Intelligence in the Second World War. She assisted historians studying war-time code breaking at Bletchley Park. Due to continuing secrecy among cryptanalysts, the full extent of her accomplishments remains unknown. On 4 September 1996, Joan Clarke Murray died at her home in Headington.