The film followed a large part of Alan Turing's life and legacy, starting with his recruitment into MI6 when he was a mathematics alumnus from Cambridge. Turing then, as is so infamously known, became the worlds leading cryptanalyst as him and his team created a device that broke the Nazi enigma, a code believed to be unbreakable. But why was the movie called the The Imitation Game? Perhaps because Alan Turing's most notable discovery was one not featured in the film.
After World War II, when Turing's achievements had been made known world wide, his status and fame skyrocketed, and landed him top positions in research institutes. In the late 1940s, as a leader of the computing laboratory at University of Manchester, Turing wrote the paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"(2).
This paper provided the basis for Artificial Intelligence, by proposing a test called "The Imitation Game".
The Turing Test was an Experiment that Alan Turing proposed, where a computer would have to trick 50% of test subjects into thinking they were digitally chatting with a human person, as opposed to a computer.
Competitions to see if anyone can pass the Turing Test with their software are held every year, called The Loebner Prize(4). Many different "chatterboxes" have come close to taking home the prize, but none have come closer than Eugene. Eugene is a Russian program that fooled 33% of individuals into believing it was a 13 year old child, and is now recognized as the most advanced AI in the world, and it is still being improved(3).
Relation to Computing:
Alan Turing had high expectations for computers. He could see the potential that lay within them to the point that they would become fluent in our language and conversation. He saw all of this by looking at just the very basic components that he had to work with.
I believe that his working on the machine that cracked the German Enigma is what gave him such faith in the future of the computer. Once it was programmed, the machine became the cryptanalyst all on it's own. Simply feed it code and it would translate to you the answer.
Alan Turing's impact on Computer Science today is immense, and his work is still studied and praised by even the most incredible programmers of our day.
References:
1. Beavers, Anthony (2013). "Alan Turing: Mathematical Mechanist". In Cooper, S. Barry; van Leeuwen, Jan. Alan Turing: His Work and Impact. Waltham: Elsevier. pp. 481–485. ISBN 978-0-12-386980-7.
2. Alan Turing. (2016, October 21). http://www.biography.com/people/alan-turing-9512017
3. Hern, A. (2014, June 09). What is the Turing test? And are we all doomed now? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/09/what-is-the-alan-turing-test
4. Artificial Intelligence | The Turing Test. (n.d.). http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/ai/turing.html
This is a really interesting progression of computing from a historical perspective, and what that specific history means to the field today. It's fascinating that artificial intelligence, a technology that seems just around the corner and cutting edge is actually an old idea in the field of computer science!
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