Resource Key
LEVEL 1
brief, basic information laid out in an easy-to-read format. May use informal language. (Includes most news articles)
LEVEL 2
provides additional background information and further reading. Introduces some subject-specific language.
LEVEL 3
lengthy, detailed information. Frequently uses technical/subject-specific language. (Includes most analytical articles)
Key Terms
- Mathematician an expert or specialist in mathematics.
- Enigma Machine An Enigma machine is a famous encryption machine used by the Germans during WWII to transmit coded messages.
- Bletchley Park Bletchley Park, British government cryptological establishment in operation during World War II. Bletchley Park was where Alan Turing and other agents of the Ultra intelligence project decoded the enemy’s secret messages, most notably those that had been encrypted with the German Enigma and Tunny cipher machines. Experts have suggested that the Bletchley Park code breakers may have shortened the war by as much as two years.
- Code breakers Information is an important commodity. Nations, corporations and individuals protect secret information with encryption, using a variety of methods ranging from substituting one letter for another to using a complex algorithm to encrypt a message.
Enigma Machine
- Enigma. (2019). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from https://school-eb-com-au.db.plcscotch.wa.edu.au/levels/high/article/Enigma/32677
Enigma, device used by the German military command to encode strategic messages before and during World War II.
The Turing Test
- Artificial intelligence (AI). (2019). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from https://school-eb-com-au.db.plcscotch.wa.edu.au/levels/high/article/artificial-intelligence/9711#219090.tocIn 1950 Turing sidestepped the traditional debate concerning the definition of intelligence, introducing a practical test for computer intelligence that is now known simply as the Turing test.
How Alan Turing cracked the Enigma Code
- IWM. (2019). How Alan Turing Cracked The Enigma Code. Retrieved from https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/how-alan-turing-cracked-the-enigma-codeAlan Turing was a brilliant mathematician. Born in London in 1912, he studied at both Cambridge and Princeton universities. He was already working part-time for the British Government’s Code and Cypher School before the Second World War broke out.
Databases
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Scholarly resources on JSTOR include Archival and Current Journals, Books, and Primary Sources.
- West Australian Digital Archive This link opens in a new window
The West Australia Archive Digital Editions provides full text searching of past issues of the West Australian. Each issue is searchable the day after publication.
Introduction
“Are you paying attention?” breathes Benedict Cumberbatch’s Alan Turing in the opening moments of this handsomely engrossing and poignantly melancholic thriller from Norwegian director Morten Tyldum. There’s little chance of doing anything else as Tyldum, who directed the tonally divergent Headhunters, serves up rollicking code-cracking wartime thrills laced with an astringent cyanide streak – a tale of plucky British ingenuity underpinned by an acknowledgement that Turing, as Gordon Brown put it, “deserved so much better”.
Granted a posthumous royal pardon for his “gross indecency” conviction only last year, the mathematician and AI pioneer changed the course of the war only to suffer the indignities of arrest and “chemical castration”, dying in 1954 having apparently taken a bite from a poisoned apple.
Yet The Imitation Game is not a tragedy – rather, it is a celebration of Turing’s extraordinary achievements, a populist yarn that makes an admirably firm fist of establishing its spiky subject as a heroic outsider. As the mantra from Graham Moore’s catchy script puts it: “Sometimes it is the people whom no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.”
Kermode, M. (2014). The Imitation Game review – an engrossing and poignant thriller. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/nov/16/the-imitation-game-review-engrossing-thriller-benedict-cumberbatch
Alan Turing
Yarnhub. (2019), Aug 30). Alan Turing - betrayed by the country he saved. [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynTAFPukXBk
- Alan Turing. (2019). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from https://school-eb-com-au.db.plcscotch.wa.edu.au/levels/high/article/Alan-Turing/73839Alan Turing, in full Alan Mathison Turing, (born June 23, 1912, London, England—died June 7, 1954, Wilmslow, Cheshire), British mathematician and logician, who made major contributions to mathematics, cryptanalysis, logic, philosophy, and mathematical biology and also to the new areas later named computer science, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and artificial life.
- HODGES, A., & Leavitt, D. (2006). A Tour of Turing. Scientific American, 294(2), 98-100. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.db.plcscotch.wa.edu.au/stable/26061344
THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH: ALAN TURING AND THE INVENTION OF THE COMPUTER by LeavittDavid - Film Review. (2014). The College Mathematics Journal, 45(1), 65-70. doi:10.4169/college.math.j.45.1.065This is the inspiring true story of a young genius whose visionary mathematical ideas cracked the Enigma code, hastening the defeat of Hitler and Nazi Germany. It is also the disturbing tale of the relentless persecution suffered by this would-be war hero at the hands of hisown government in disgraceful response to his homosexuality. Though Turing’s place in the pantheon of great 20th century intellects is widely recognized within academia, his accomplishments and life story remain surprisingly unknown elsewhere. The new feature-length drama-documentary Codebreaker aims to change that.
- Barbier, M.K. (2019). Bletchley Park. In World Book Student. Retrieved from https://www.worldbookonline.com/student-new/#/article/home/ar752053Bletchley Park was an important center of British military intelligence during World War II (1939-1945). Initially a private estate, Bletchley Park housed the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS).
Homosexuality and the law, then and now.
Now This News. (2016, October 21). Thousands of Gay Men Have Been Pardoned By The British Government Now This. [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=34&v=154hGAapKn8
Bletchly Park
PA3DMI. (2012, April 21). Bletchley Park Tour [docu in full]. [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3678&v=OuEHcJ7CCzg
- Bletchley Park. (n.d.) Bletchley Park. Retrieved from https://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/The Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) devised methods to enable the Allied forces to decipher the military codes and ciphers that secured German, Japanese, and other Axis nation’s communications.
- Bletchley Park. (2019). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from https://school-eb-com-au.db.plcscotch.wa.edu.au/levels/high/article/Bletchley-Park/627744Bletchley Park, British government cryptological establishment in operation during World War II. Bletchley Park was where Alan Turing and other agents of the Ultra intelligence project decoded the enemy’s secret messages, most notably those that had been encrypted with the German Enigma and Tunny cipher machines. Experts have suggested that the Bletchley Park code breakers may have shortened the war by as much as two years.
- Barbier, M.K. (2019). Bletchley Park. In World Book Student. Retrieved from https://www.worldbookonline.com/student-new/#/article/home/ar752053Bletchley Park was an important center of British military intelligence during World War II (1939-1945). Initially a private estate, Bletchley Park housed the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS).