Reddit mentions of Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game - Updated Edition

Turing was very well-liked. If you're referencing the Imitation Game - that movie was ridiculously inaccurate. I don't understand Hollywood's need to cast every "smart person" as a tortured Sheldon Cooper clone.

Sources:

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/dec/19/poor-imitation-alan-turing/

http://www.amazon.com/Alan-Turing-Enigma-Inspired-Imitation/dp/069116472X

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/12/03/the_imitation_game_fact_vs_fiction_how_true_the_new_movie_is_to_alan_turing.html

Alan Turing: The Enigma is the inspiration for the movie.

Alan Turing didn't control what intelligence got pass on, in the end that was Stewart Menzies role. Once the hut 8 broke the naval enigma some moved on to breaking other enigma codes. Turing actually visited the US and started to work on voice encryption.

Alan Turing: The enigma is the biography the movie was loosely based off. It is highly detailed and I recommend it if you are interested in knowing more.

This article goes through the differences between the movie and reality

I've read a few books about WW2 tech and I can't remember exactly which one talked about it - it may have been Alan Turing: The Enigma, or perhaps Simon Singh's The Code Book. I tried searching online but I can't find anything for some reason :/ I hope whichever book wrote about it didn't make it up.

I first read Andrew Hodges' Alan Turing: The Enigma in high school. The biography is WONDERFUL and I would highly recommend it to anyone inspired to learn more about Alan Turing. Hodges work and his Turing biography are largely responsible for the "rehabilitation" of Alan Turing's public stature and the resurgence of interest into Alan Turing's work and life.

The biography is a much more of a complete (and accurate) account of Alan Turing's life than what you see in The Imitation Game. Hodges spent 6 years meticulously researching Turing's life, interviewing surviving witnesses and going back to available primary sources, in order to provide a 3 dimensional picture of Alan Turing. The biography is intimate, insightful and notable for Hodges' empathetic account of Turing's sexual identity which broke with the cultural norms of the time (when it would have been "polite" to simply ignore or gloss over Turning's sexuality). It has, for good reason, been called one of the best scientific biographies ever written and really is the definitive Turing biography.


I.J. "Jack" Good (a fellow Bletchley cryptanalyst who worked with Turing in Hut 8 and after the war at Manchester University) gave it an impressive review:
>Researched and written extraordinarily well. It’s a first-class contribution to history and an exemplary work of biography.

>Nature 307, 663-664 (16 February 1984)



On his website, Hodges has a short biography of Turing, which you can read here, based on the entry he wrote for the British Dictionary of National Biography in 1995.

The latest edition of Hodges' biography, Alan Turing: The Enigma - The Book That Inspired the Film, has been further updated (to include details from the centenary and the 2013 pardon) and has larger typeface to make it easier on the eyes. It's back in-stock on AMAZON and is available on KINDLE as well as iTunes / iBooks.

Yeah me 3 ... recommend it, and if you liked the movie I highly recommend the book and if you firehose that, might be time to get the paper On Computable Numbers

> they're trying to make a biopic that's historically accurate as possible.

That's laughable. Even the part about him possibly having Aspergers is exaggerated and doesn't fit historical facts.

Hodges' biography of him paints quite a different picture of Turing and the events depicted in the film. That book was supposed to be what they based the film on, and I think Hodges was actually under contract for it, but they deviated a lot from his source.

since a movie came out recently on turing, perhaps alan turing biography by andrew hodges? from what i could gather, it's a highly regarded book. i'm thinking of reading it myself.

http://www.amazon.com/Alan-Turing-Enigma-Inspired-Imitation/dp/069116472X