Slashdot have a story to the effect that Leonardo DiCaprio is to play Alan Turing in a film that will mark the mathematician’s centenary next year.
Great news – the man’s memory deserves nothing more than the actor who has proved himself to be both great and edgy in recent work (he’s certainly not the milque toast figure the start of his career briefly suggested.)
As a geek, of course, I hope that the film will try to explain, just a little his achievements.
But how can you explain the ideas of computability and the Church-Turing thesis in a popular film? A tough one, but I suppose you could do something.
The Bletchley Park “bombe” and the idea that the weakness of the German Enigma machine – that it would never map a letter to itself (eg., in any message “e” would never be encrypted as “e”) – could be used to break the code (if a combination of a guessed plain text, usually a weather report, at the start of the message , and the initial key settings produced code that mapped letters to themselves then the initial settings were wrong) – is probably easier to explain.
And don’t forget about SIGSALY, the voice encryption system Turing worked on with Bell Labs. As a piece of engineering this is probably impossible to over-estimate in importance: as the first practical pulse code modulation system it could even be said to be the mother the mobile phone, or at least its grand aunt.
And, of course, let me again plug my book of the year: The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing’s Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine
Related articles
- Leonardo DiCaprio To Play Alan Turing? (news.slashdot.org)
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- Leonardo DiCaprio To Play Gay Enigma Code Breaker Alan Turing? (pinkbananaworld.com)
- DiCaprio Rumored To Play WWII Codebreaker Alan Turing – And Every Gay Figure In History Ever (queerty.com)
- Alan Turing’s Biopic Might Get the Hollywood Hunk Treatment from Leo DiCaprio [Movies] (gizmodo.com)
- Leonardo DiCaprio tipped to play codebreaker Alan Turing (guardian.co.uk)
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 