

Math Anxiety: Why Hollywood Makes Robots of Alan Turing and Other Geniuses - dnetesn
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/how-hollywood-portrays-alan-turing-and-other-math-geniuses/?ref=technology&_r=0

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Animats
_Mr. Turing was a British math prodigy who during World War II broke a
supposedly unbreakable Nazi code. He made a programmable machine, which took
the information from one task to execute the next, reaching powerful
conclusions._

So much wrong there. Polish cryptographers broke Enigma, and built the first
"bombe", a key-testing machine. Turing figured out how to speed up the
process, at a cost in wiring complexity. Turing never "built a programmable
machine", although he conceptualized one. Flowers designed Colossus, which
wasn't a general purpose computer, just an electronic key-tester, like a
Bitcoin mining ASIC. At Bletchly Park, Turing was part of a team headed by
Dilly Knox, working with John Jeffreys and Peter Twinn.

There's a forgotten history of electronic digital non-general-purpose
computing devices: Teleregister (stock quotes), International Totalizator
(racetracks), and Reservisor (airline reservations). The WWII cryptanalysis
machines, and the ENIAC, all belong to that category. Programming of those
involved big plugboards, not loading memory with a program. That sort of thing
disappeared in the 1970s, as CPUs became cheaper. (It's back, with FPGAs and
ASICs used for high-performance special purpose tasks like packet routing.)

The real inventor of the modern computer was John von Neumann, who's never had
a movie about him. He's the one who insisted that random access memory, with
both code and data in the same memory, was the way to go, and that computers
should work in binary. His 1946 paper
([http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall12/cos375/Bu...](http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall12/cos375/Burks.pdf))
describes most of basic computer architecture, and will look very familiar to
anyone who knows how a simple CPU works. In his spare time, he did some design
work on the implosion system for the first atomic bomb, and, using an early
computer he designed, the EDSAC, some of the design work for the H-bomb. Also
lots of good papers on math and quantum mechanics. Von Neumann was a party
guy, known for his dinner parties at the Institute for Advanced Study at
Princeton. Married twice, divorced once. Not much angst in his life; he was a
cheerful sort and had a good life. Died young, in 1957 at age 53, so he didn't
get to see the computer era really take off.

Even less well known is the inventor of modern cryptanalysis, William F.
Friedman. Friedman turned cryptanalysis from a guessing game to a number-
crunching problem. He headed the effort that broke the Japanese "Purple" code,
a tougher job than Enigma. Much of the theory behind cryptanalysis is his
work. The auditorium at NSA headquarters is named after him. He was a military
officer in WWI, married once. Famous quote: "No new cypher is worth looking at
unless it comes from someone who has broken a very hard one." Friedman really
did break some major cyphers on his own.

Neither von Neumann nor Friedman had unusual personal lives, so they don't
have movies. Both were probably smarter than Turing.

~~~
munin
> The auditorium at NSA headquarters is named after him

it is named after both william and elizabeth friedman, both of whom were
professional cryptographers who worked for the US government.

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whistlerbrk
The movie was lazy. They employed the same old brilliant "a ha" moment of
insight at the bar they have done in so many others. Run to the office!
Eureka! Bollocks.

They can't seem to imagine a world where its hard work that actually pays off.

~~~
olavk
Maybe they can imagine - writing movies is also hard work, believe it or not.
But they also know that sitting at a desk and calculating for years is not
very entertaining to look at.

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swordswinger12
I don't care that I'm beating a dead horse here - if you haven't read Andrew
Hodges' excellent biography of Alan Turing, you should put it on your holiday
reading list. Link: [http://www.amazon.com/Alan-Turing-Enigma-Inspired-
Imitation/...](http://www.amazon.com/Alan-Turing-Enigma-Inspired-
Imitation/dp/069116472X/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1417457678&sr=8-1)

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CapitalistCartr
Hollywood is mostly a system of aggregating tropes into stories. The minority
sidekick, token minorities, the plucky Southern Women (Steel Magnolias?
Really?), the imminint danger down to the second, etc. There is a book on
movie plot writing called, "Save The Cat" that is the most insightful book
I've read on that subject.

The plot of "Avatar" was depressingly cliche; a standard retelling of the
standard action movie plot, done once again. The special effects made it worth
seeing, twice for me. Rarely does a movie rise above such things.

[http://www.amazon.com/Save-Last-Book-Screenwriting-
Youll/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Save-Last-Book-Screenwriting-
Youll/dp/1932907009)

~~~
technofiend
The structure of most stories fall into one of a few categories; in fact Kurt
Vonnegut's rejected Master's Thesis was based on cataloging those categories
and diagramming their structures. [http://www.openculture.com/2014/02/kurt-
vonnegut-masters-the...](http://www.openculture.com/2014/02/kurt-vonnegut-
masters-thesis-rejected-by-u-chicago.html)

Really what makes it interesting is in the telling of the story. Did you end
up writing Star Wars: A New Hope or another I Love Lucy episode?

~~~
hga
Then again, that first _Star Wars_ movie is mostly taken from Kurosawa's _The
Hidden Fortress_
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_Fortress](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_Fortress)),
right down to the personalities of the robots... I gather _The Dam Busters_
and perhaps other films of that sort (none of which I've seen) get a lot of
credit for the end.

~~~
olavk
"Mostly taken from..." is really stretching it. Yeah he was inspired by those
movies, but to say "mostly taken from" is ignoring all the things which is
original about the movie. And Star Wars really was an original movie when it
arrived.

If you look at Shakespeare almost all his basic story lines (and many
characters) are taken from history or from other plays or stories. That does
not mean that Shakespeares plays are "mostly taken from" earlier sources.

