My daughter recently got a smart toy robot for Christmas. You can program it by giving it a set of instructions. The instructions are made up of commands (things that the robot is capable of - like turning left or right, switching on its headlight or moving forward or backward) and parameters (switch the light on for how long or move how many feet forward or backward or turn in what direction and by how many degrees.) The robot is unlike any toy my daughters had played with. It isn’t designed to do anything specific but you can program it to do many different kinds of things.

That is essentially a Turing Machine or, a computer. Turing invented the concept of a computer as we know it today. From what sits on our desktop at work, to the phone in our pockets to the war machines that fire precision guided missiles. Turing created the concept of a general purpose machine that can solve almost any mathematical problem within reason by simply doing what is essentially an addition of bits (0s and 1s). You can give it inputs, it would process them and produce an output. 

It was a great revelation to my daughters as they learned that all computers - and all their favorite games on their iPod basically were modern versions of that same concept that Turing was one of the first to come up with. Our gratitude to Turing is immense. We as a society have paid it like we usually pay our gratitude - by ignorance and cruelty.

Turing was one of the greatest minds of the 20th century and had he not been gay, he likely would have been been worshipped more than Einstein. Unfortunately, for the World, his achievements were mostly kept under wraps by the British government and he was never really freely celebrated until recently. We are now in an age of the resurgence of Turing awareness - as a brilliant mathematician, cryptologist and the father of modern computer science. 

“The Imitation Game” is a new film about Alan Turing and how he made a machine to break the German enigma code and help the allies win World War II. The film is at best a poor imitation of Turing’s life. It is smartly made to avoid going into any depths of Turing’s science or philosophy. It disrespects the intelligence of its viewers (and perhaps Turing's) and doesn’t trust them with really any complicated scientific discussion about what Turing’s ideas about the machine were. It is very happy to tell the story like a World War II thriller - a Great Escape - rather than a story about computing. Alas there probably would never have been a market for that. And the Weinstein company likes to win its Oscars, which almost mandate a shallow tearjerker in favor of any profound technical discourse. So we get a film mostly about Turing’s personal life focused largely on Turing’s “differentness” and his strange relationship with those around him. A tale from his childhood is given far more importance and screen time than the bombe - the machines that actually cracks the code. He is almost made into a maverick, a Hemingway Code Hero, your average Ethan Hunt on yet another impossible mission, when he was probably anything but that. It also seems hastily made - perhaps in too much of a rush to hit the 2014 Oscar timeline. 

Having said that, Benedict Cumberbatch is probably the only real choice you had today to play the lead role. Often times he just seems to be reliving the Sherlock role that has made him famous. He is excellent and a shoe-in for a best actor nomination. Though he should not win. The rest of the cast is a lineup of TV’s who is who - and that is a good thing. And Kiera Knightley who is fine in a role that seems largely ceremonial. 

The world certainly needed a film on Alan Turing. However, The Imitation Game is a shallow, misguided film that doesn’t even begin to tell us the real story of Turing and his contribution to mankind. We will need a much smarter and braver cinema and probably a much smarter, braver and tolerant audience. Perhaps a TV show? or how about a brilliant podcast? Studio 360's episode on Alan Turing is a must!