If you are a technology geek and you haven’t yet seen this movie, you must adopt some other passion. The Imitation Game is one of the most brilliantly produced movies on the journey a technology entrepreneur goes through and the kind of resistance he gets from the people around him who just wouldn’t believe the crazy ideas he’s got to solve the world’s most inscrutable problems.
It is a historical film about the mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing who is hired to crack a code entitled ‘Enigma’ that Nazi Germany is using to land surprise attacks on the Allies. Starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing and Keira Knightly as Joan Clarke, the film shows the amazing journey that led to the creation of the world’s first computer.
Few people know that the greatest invention of all time was born out of a need to win the war against Germany. Such collaboration of military intelligence, academics and mathematicians, led to the creation of machines that could compute millions of calculations in seconds,that manual labor would have taken a century.
Turing is ridiculed by everyone around him, but an oft-repeated line in the movie is sufficient to speak for him:
“Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.”
In charge of the team trying to decipher the Enigma,Turing publishes a difficult crossword placed in newspapers in order to find suitable people to join his team. Those who solve it are called in for a screening. The test is about to begin in a room full of male candidates. But true to history, the doorman to the room is surprised when Joan Clarke, a woman, bumps in as the candidate for the exam.
The women of that time were hired to be programmers; people who would compute certain mechanical tasks on a machine, and hence were called computers. Women, don’t be embarrassed yet. You are about to hear something that you yourself couldn’t think you could do.
Ms. Clarke goes on to become the pioneer of the software revolution. Because at that time women weren’t entrusted to deal with hardware, which was a man’s domain, and software wasn’t thought of something so important for men to spend their time fiddling with. So women were hired to deal with the software of machines. And you can guess what happened next. All the growth in the IT industry you see today is due to the creation of new software every day. So the next time your parents tell you that women can’t be software engineers, mathematicians and coders, you can throw something at their face; history.
Together with Clarke and others, Turing is able to build a machine that he names ‘Christopher’ after a young friend of his who died in his boyhood. This machine was then able to save over 14 million lives as it cut short the war by two years. When everyone thought that the war was won on the ground, it was actually won by the intelligence that resulted due to these computing machines.
Perhaps if the movie didn’t satiate your hunger, you must get hold of the book ‘The Innovators’ to give yourself a more detailed perspective on what really inspired the digital revolution.