By Karen - 04 August 2021
In the last twenty minutes of "The Imitation Game", in the interrogation room, Turing, facing the inspector, said the title of the play: What is the difference between a human and a machine? The most essential difference between the two is that people have different ideas, but machines do not. You love strawberries, I hate skating, you like reading, and I am allergic to pollen... Turing's remarks pointed out the two most important themes in his life: career and sexuality.
Turing's life is famous for the creation of the Turing machine, which is the computer for which later generations without digital farmers have contributed their entire lives. When he said "Digital Computer" in the play, many people's hearts sounded with vigorous background music: Ah, an era has begun. However, in "The Imitation Game", the main plot is his process of deciphering the German password "mystery" in World War II. He and his colleagues made unsung heroic contributions to World War II. "Mystery" was the world's most advanced encryptor invented by the German army during World War II. Due to its complex structure, it created almost impossible possibilities. If Turing and his colleagues used manual algorithms to solve one possibility every ten minutes, it would take them 20 million years to calculate all the possibilities. The artificial road was blocked; this made Turing think that he wanted to create something faster than humans, the electronic brain, which is the prototype of the computer. How big and complicated the "computer" was in those days: countless copper wires and letter wheels rumbling on the screen, but the speed is many times slower than today's computers. However, such a machine is the ancestor of all computers in later generations. It is enough to decipher the German password. This is something that humans cannot do, but machines can.
However, what are the things that machines cannot do? choose. Machines do not choose, they can only tell humans what they have calculated; it is always humans who make the choice. After the "mystery" is cracked, once the cracking is used, the German army will know that their password has been cracked, and once the German army abandons the password, they will give up their previous efforts. Turing and his colleagues faced the most difficult choice in the world: how to use their deciphering to protect the British people as much as possible and end the war early, without being known by the Germans? This is the most difficult problem in the world: is one person's life important, or is the life of five people important? Or are the lives of 10 million people important? Who should be sacrificed, and who should be protected? The difficulty with this choice is that no matter what kind of choice, someone will swear. In the movie, Turing's mouth is not without ridicule, "The whole world thinks this is a magnificent duel between different civilizations, but in our opinion, it is only a statistically calculated probability number." War is nothing more than that, even. Human life is nothing more than this. Turing researched the most advanced machine in the world, but who does this machine serve?
Perhaps because of this, the British government burned all their data and achievements after the war. They went back to their respective universities, goodbye, all the files became blank, they kept this matter secret for more than 50 years. After the war, Turing was convicted of "indecent assault" for homosexuality. He chose the latter between serving two years in prison and taking hormones, which destroyed his spirit. Less than 42 years old, he chose to commit suicide, and one of the world's greatest lives came to a close. He could create the smartest machine in the world, but he could only make the most tragic choice in his own life; he named his Turing machine "Christopher", which was the name of his first love. There was such a person in history, and he did lead him into the world of cryptography, but he died of bovine tuberculosis when he was young because of drinking contaminated milk. In the movie, his death is dramatic: a campus full of bullying behaviors, two teenagers live on each other. When a man muster the courage to find another teenager with the code written "I love you", he heard bad news. His death changed Turing's worldview, and since then he has become a complete materialist atheist.
Homosexuality, like the invention of the Turing machine, is an act that transcended society at the time and was not included in mainstream groups. It is mentioned many times in the movie: Only the most difficult to guess can do the most shocking things. Turing is like this, a great person who can guide human progress in history, which is not so. Even if such a secret has been kept for decades, people will finally be able to correctly evaluate his contribution one day.
