ANKIT SINGHA

A wonderful movie that must be watched, more so because it has, among others, four very talented and prominent actors - Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Strong, Charles Dance and Keira Knightley. A strong five stars for the entire cast and crew as well as the script. Kudos to the author of the book bearing the same name on which this movie is based. In this particular movie, the closing scene shows what a significant contribution Alan Turing had made, which now has become an inseparable part of our lives - Computers. The sheer fact that he imagined a computing machine when people had no idea about something of that sort (that too during World War II) - to solve a problem (decoding Hitler's Enigma machine codes) that other highly talented people attempted to solve and failed and then considered unsolvable, which he claimed could be made to think as well, that now inspires AI, shows that people like him can "see" far further than anyone can even vaguely imagine at the time. He seemed to have understood very early on that to beat a machine that generated random codes with millions of possible settings every single day, with the entire set of codes changing every day at midnight, they would need to build a machine to work fast enough to decode the codes and assist the huge number of cryptographers who were working at the time. He proposed a machine into which they could feed the codes taken from Enigma intercepts and out would come the decoded message like magic. He was also intelligent enough to advise the government not to act on every decoded message so as to keep the German soldiers from suspecting that their secret regarding the Enigma machine has been discovered as that would have rendered all their efforts worthless. That obviously did not go down well with some people as shown in the movie, but it did serve its ultimate purpose - Help Britain win what people thought was a lost war. I believe that all of this is not possible without God's grace. Its only possible with God's grace that he also had the immense patience and intelligence required to bring about such a revolution and turn his imagination into a reality. I don't know how many people have watched the movie "The Man Who Knew Infinity", but that movie, just like this one points to the fact that geniuses in most cases are born not into a rich family with a luxurious lifestyle and under peaceful circumstances but in circumstances when geniuses are least expected. In most cases they are also different from other people in their abilities and the way they think and live. They are people with imagination which people of their time considered madness to a certain degree. In many cases they have serious shortcomings too. Take Thomas Alva Edison for example, who is believed to have suffered from dyslexia (although I'm not quite sure he really did), yet he invented something which said goodbye to darkness forever, in addition to more than a thousand other useful things.