I suppose we shall never know what really happened when Turing died. The investigation was not conducted the way it should have been. On the other hand I do not see a reason for murder and I wonder if an intelligent man like Turing really would have been sloppy enough to poison himself by accident. 

We should not forget the overall climate of distrust, the anti-Communist manhunt in the US, men like Burgess who created suspicion towards "unreliable gay men" in Britain. The fact that Turing's Norwegian friend was chased and told to stay away from him may have been an indicator that he did feel observed and cast out. I think I read that in the 1950s climate he would never have got the clearance for working at a place like Bletchley. 
I am not sure if the story about the fortune teller in the seaside resort is mentioned by Hodges or someone else. He visited the town with friends and went to see this woman and came back very subdued. His friends said he seemed very much changed and some days later he was found dead. I am not talking about anything supernatural here but it seems that shortly before his death he was not as hopeful and positive as some biographers say. 

Maybe you know the letter Benedict read at Letters Live and which shows that Turing closely associated his standing and credibility as a scientist with his public reputation. 

I'm afraid that the following syllogism may be used by some in the future.

Turing believes machines think
Turing lies with men
Therefore machines do not think

Yours in distress,
Alan

It was written two years before his death but I feel that the hormone treatment and the public humiliation did not improve his situation. 
 

Last edited by SusiGo (November 13, 2017 2:53 pm)

Yes, it was Hodges who mentions  the Gypsy fortune teller, but as nobody knows what she told Turing, and nobody knows why he was shocked, there's no point to the story. Neither do we know anything about Kjell - how the authorities heard about him, why they hunted for him. It's all very mysterious...

besleybeans, Turing broke the law as it was at the time. The law was wrong, but that's never a valid excuse for breaking it. If you do, the first rule is "Don't get caught!" Once he had admitted everything to the police (instead of simply denying that there was any truth to what the burglar said), there wasn't all that much the authorities could do. I dare say that he actually was lucky that he got caught before the big "let's eradicate vice" wave had really started - as mentioned above, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu was treated even worse. And nobody has made a film about him and the only people who know his name are car enthousiasts ;)

Incidentally, Alan Turing hasn't exactly been the "forgotten hero" as which he is now presented either: His paper "Can a machine think" was mentioned in a 1999 lecture in my course on Human-Machine Communication, and it's on the reading list for the course on Artificial Intelligence.

On the other hand, what do you know about Tommy Flowers?

This may be true for the UK as a whole and people who are acquainted with this part of history but I am quite sure that e.g. in Germany many people outside the realms of history and maths/computer science had not heard of him or his fate. 

I'm sure there were people all around the world who were aware of his contribution to computing, but anybody that I know didn't know about his contribution to the war before the film came out (and not knowing anyone in math or computing, I hadn't heard of him in any context that I could recall). And that stuff was kept secret for a long time after the war. So I think his involvment in the war was less well-known.

Last edited by Yitzock (November 13, 2017 10:55 pm)

As I said, I heard about Turing in connection with AI - which I consider normal. Most scientists are only known to those working in the same field. How many other mathematicians do you know (of)? What DO you know about Tommy Flowers (before googling him!)? Who knows the names of other people who played important roles in Bletchley Park (people not mentioned in The Imitation Game)? Secret Service employees are supposed to be secret!

The film makes it appear as if Alan Turing had singlehandedly won the war for the Allies, and that's simply not true (and information learned from U-Boat transmissions certainly had no bearing on Stalingrad, grrr...). He was one of a team, and there's no reason for him to be any more famous than the others...  Somebody here in the thread bemoaned that Turing and Co. were simply sent home at the end of the war, without thanks and the admonition to never see each other again - none of that is true either: Turing got an OBE and probably the other important people as well (Hodges mentions it was a standard recognition for civil servants of Turing's official rank). And they did meet again later if the occasion arose - Hugh Alexander appeared as a character witness at Turing's trial. Turing also informed Joan Clarke of his arrest and the upcoming trial (like his other friends) - she didn't discover it afterwards as shown in the film.

Liberty wrote:

...  but I do think that sometimes it's right to break the law when the law is wrong.   ....

Oh, I agree 100%! I'm firmly convinced that 90 km/h on a dry, large, well-maintained road that's straight as a ruler and has no other traffic of any sort as far as I can see is much too low, which is why I regularly drive faster...

Agreed. 

I do not see Turing as an arrogant arsehole at all. He sometimes comes across as arrogant because he is honest to the point of being blunt. And he lacks social cues. But I found him to be a quite sympathetic character.

Perhaps you're not so fond of Benedict's later works? It seems you have some major criticism towards TIG, Dr. Strange and Sherlock, so it might be that he is going in a different direction than you would prefer when it comes to what kind of movies/shows he does and the characters he chooses to play?

Last edited by Vhanja (November 15, 2017 10:40 am)

Criticism is fine. I just wonder if too much criticism may spoil the fun. For me it would. 

Obviously everyone is going to have different things that don't appeal to them in a film, but when it comes to film, especially a non-documentary film, dramatizing facts is not bad writing in my mind. A film like The Imitation Game, while to some extent intending to get more people to know about something happened, is not only about sharing the events but also getting to the heart of the people who were involved and what they experienced (and perhaps getting people interested in learning more about the people who were portrayed). Up to a point, I don't expect everything to be exactly as it happened. It's about the experience of the characters. And I think The Imitation Game is well-written because it succeeded in making me feel the sense of urgency and frustration and fear and everything else that those people went through during that time. And it made me aware of another part of the war effort that I did not know about before. 
Maybe in real life they didn't have to always stop decoding their messages at midnight. But when that happens in the film, it gives you sense of how things change so quickly, that you can't fall behind what is going on or else more people could die and war could be lost. From what I remember, it wasn't so much that the information was irrelevant after that time, as far as the content of the message, but it meant that the Enigma code would be reset again and so they wouldn't be able to decode the next one with the same cipher (or whatever you call it, key?). It keeps things moving a long and maintains tension.
One thing that is true is how much Christopher meant to Alan (as is evident in Turing's letter that Benedict read at Letters Live), and I thought that was another part of the story that was done effectively. Even though in real life Christopher is not the name that was given to the machine that Turing built, in a dramatic sense it is beautiful and helps you to understand how much Christopher meant to him and inspired him to pursue what he ended up pursuing in life. Dramatically, and for a narrative, it makes sense. It gives things a cohesion, a sense of wholeness. Real life doesn't always have that sense of wholeness, but art can.

Yitzock, you have a point - in a way. In another way, it just bothers me that people now believe to know that Turing had Asperger's or was autistic, that they believe to know that he committed suicide (I still don't buy it!).

For me life is about learning, and the things I see and read stick with me (I once got a point in an exam when quoting a fact from a Dick Francis novel(!) - luckily they were well-researched), and from a docudrama or biopic I expect a higher degree of accuracy than from a fictional story. For me, if people don't want to stay near the facts, then they should change the names and not say "based on a true story".

miriel68, what you say about people accepting someone who is different is a beautiful message - but Alan Turing doesn't seem to have had much of a problem with his colleagues anyway (probably because he didn't play the solitary genius role in which the movie shows him at the beginning of his time of Bletchley Park). All through his adult life he's had friends, and at least one long-term lover.

SusiGo, Vhanja - how do you manage to switch off your brains so you can enjoy the movie?

Last edited by Kittyhawk (November 29, 2017 1:23 pm)