MovieChat Forums > The Imitation Game (2014) Discussion > The great discovery was beyond obvious (...

The great discovery was beyond obvious (spoilers, obviously)

posted 9 years ago by jgroub
22 replies | jump to latest

When Turing "discovers" that a particular message always starts with the word "weather" and always ends off with "Heil Hitler", the movie hails this as a brilliant insight. This becomes the turning point of the film, and Enigma is cracked. What utter rubbish. This is absolutely the first thing they would have done, and, according to Wikipedia, the first thing they actually did do.

This is the basis of cryptography. When you do the Cryptoquote in your daily newspaper, the absolute, very first thing you do is look for words that are one letter. That word can only be "a" or "I". You also look for repeated words of three letters. That word can almost always only be "the" or, less likely, but possible, "and."

We here in America who have been doing the Cryptoquote and/or watching Wheel of Fortune for the past 30 years know this.

Any cryptography team worth its salt would know this.

This "brilliant insight" was incredibly shallow and ultimately silly. I was wondering the whole movie why they weren't reverse engineering this and doing this from the start. Now I know it's because the screenplay writers dumbed this down to the level of retards.

I want the doctor to take your picture so I can look at you from inside as well.

[–] shepherd-26 9 years ago

You are right, it couldn't have happened that way. Not to mention Helen revealing information in public about what she did at Bletchley would have got her fired, or worse!

From the minute the bombe was invented, it required cribs to work. That's the only way it could work, knowing something to look for. It was in the design all along.

But the filmmakers needed some drama, and they got it. I, for one, was choked up at the moment Alan Turing said "well, it looks like Heil Hitler is all you need to know to win the war." He never would have said that, of course, but it was a dramatic moment.

[–] jgroub 9 years ago

Oh, it's still a good movie and all, very enjoyable. But this business about finding it because of the Heil Hitler thing is just sooo beyond ridiculous.

In the movie A Beautiful Mind, they have a similar scene where Nash received his huge revelation in relation to games theory. If you'll remember, there is a hot blonde at a bar with some of her friends, and Nash and his group are all intent on getting that blonde.

Nash realizes that if they all come on to her, not only will there be an incredible amount of c0ck-blocking going on, but she'll end up not choosing any of them. Worse, her friends will also not thereafter be receptive to their come-ons because no one likes to be a second choice. NOBODY gets laid.

BUT - if they ignore the blonde, and they all go for the second-best options first, then they ALL GET LAID.

It is a brilliant scene, and brilliantly portrayed. Watch for yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CemLiSI5ox8

The big plus the movie-makers had going for them there is that basically no one in the general public knows sh!t about games theory. There is no "Wheel of Hot Blondes" with Pat Sajak as host airing nightly.

But the problem here is that there is a "Wheel of Fortune", there is a Cryptoquote in the daily paper, and we in the general public all know more than a little something about how to crack a code - we've all been doing it for many years.

In addition to my wondering why they weren't doing the Heil Hitler substitution thing all along during the entire movie, when they finally get to the scene where they figure it out, the only feeling I'm left with is that I am much, much smarter than an entire roomful of the finest mathematical minds in Britain. It didn't say much for the British. Or, more to the point, for the filmmakers.

It's rather poor story telling in an otherwise good movie.

I want the doctor to take your picture so I can look at you from inside as well.

[–] shepherd-26 9 years ago

That was a great scene in A Beautiful Mind. As I recall, after Nash explained his theory, Hansen, his main rival, said "Nash, if this is just a trick for you to get the blond ....". I agree, another great movie.

I think the moviemakers on TIG faced a problem in that there wasn't one "revealing moment" when the code was broken once and for all. It was more of a continual process of guessing the right cribs, employing newfound tricks, capturing a German codebook or daily key sheet occasionally didn't hurt either, and having the assistance of a turncoat (Hans Thilo Schmidt) of course helped. But the Germans would constantly change their procedures, for obvious reasons, and Bletchley would be locked out of decrypting intercepts until they could correctly react to the German changes; sometimes that took many months. There just wasn't one "aha" moment, which the filmmakers wanted to have for dramatic purposes. The movie implies that there was one great moment of revelation, and it is just not true.

The scene with Helen mentioned "CILLY"s, which was a term that the codebreakers used for common errors that the German Enigma operators would make occasionally that helped in the decryption of intercepts, but that term was really used out of context in that scene.

[–] jgroub 9 years ago

Yup, that's what he said.

I just wish they could have come up with some other "A ha!" moment that actually did make sense and would have left the audience with an "A ha!" as well instead of "Duh." It's fine that there really was no moment like that in real life - this movie is so far from history that it doesn't matter. And I don't know what that moment should have been; but then again, I don't get paid the big bucks to write Hollywood screenplays.

I want the doctor to take your picture so I can look at you from inside as well.

[–] shepherd-26 9 years ago

I too wish for that. If I can think of an idea along those lines, I'll post it, maybe the next moviemaker can take advantage of it (and pay me millions of dollars for the idea)!

I wonder how much the Hollywood writers make. I have a feeling it pales in comparison to what the big stars make.

[–] 9 years ago

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[–] shepherd-26 9 years ago

Turing did say that in TIG. I think that may have been the only inaccuracy in the movie. 😀

I don't know if it was so much the number of cribs required, as the accuracy of the cribs. A bunch of cribs consisting of words not found in the messages would be of little use, but a few that did correspond to words in the messages would probably meet with success, at least some of the time. And I would imagine that cribs were specific to senders. Cribs for weather reports from ships would probably be very different from cribs for messages from headquarters, for example, or land-based units. I'd like to find a book that discusses cribs in detail, but I haven't found one yet.

I think the group at Bletchley that determined possible cribs was extremely important in the decryption effort, as important as Turing and the bombe crew, because without good cribs the bombes were useless.

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[–] shepherd-26 9 years ago

Thanks Al, I'll look at that now.

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[–] shepherd-26 9 years ago

Instead of using Helen at the bar scene leading to the "aha" moment, a better choice might have been to somehow tell the story of British seamen Fasson and Grazier, who died as they captured valuable code sheets from a sinking Uboat. This capture enabled the codebreakers to initially break the Shark Uboat Enigma code. But this would require another subplot that the moviemakers probably thought would distract from the Bletchley scene.

[–] jgroub 9 years ago

And, I think more to the point, it would detract from the "brilliance" of Bletchley Park. Capturing code sheets isn't the same as some amazing deductive leap of intuition that cracks the code.

I want the doctor to take your picture so I can look at you from inside as well.

[–] shepherd-26 9 years ago

You're right.

[–] poetcomic1 8 years ago

I thought the idiosyncrasies and styles of individual operators as intuitively picked up the messsage-girls and the 'CILLY' thing was fascinating and believable as a means of code breaking but then it went off on that idiotic 'Heil Hitler' business.

[–] katiefanatic-791-306918 9 years ago

it's the only thing that bothered me about this movie. and that it comes so late in the movie too. and in the movie it's been about 2 years or so. i mean seriously? SPEED IT UP. that scene should have come MUCH sooner.

[–] 9 years ago

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[–] Ite 9 years ago

according to Wikipedia

[–] lucao7 9 years ago

Same thought here, even a child would think of that first. Movie is good, but that moment was lame.

[–] Rat_27 8 years ago

I always find documentaries and re-enactments to be rather boring, so ... I don't watch them.

[–] doug-643 8 years ago

To be fair, the real story is embedded in that scene in the bit about the German Enigma operator who had a girlfriend.

Knowing that a particular sequence of letters is embedded at the end of an Enigma encrypted message is nearly useless, because each letter in a message changes how the next one is encoded. But the closer you are to the beginning of the message, the closer you are to the initial rotor settings.

That's why the Enigma operators were instructed to start each message with random characters. If you know a message starts with "WEATHER REPORT" it's much different from a message that starts "KTBUWN WEATHER REPORT".

Which in turn is why discovering that some operators weren't prefixing messages with random characters was so important.

But being a visual medium it's hard to get that across without an expository monolog which is boring in a movie.

[–] shepherd-26 8 years ago

Knowing that a particular sequence of letters is embedded at the end of an Enigma encrypted message is nearly useless, because each letter in a message changes how the next one is encoded. But the closer you are to the beginning of the message, the closer you are to the initial rotor settings.

You need to understand how the bombe works. It needs cribs, which are words or phrases that are likely to be encoded within the ciphertext. The cribs can appear anywhere within the message. The bombes scan the entire message looking for start positions that could result in the finding of a crib. When such a start position is found, it must be tested with the entire message (manually, using a Typex machine) to see if it makes sense; usually it wouldn't. That was called a "stop", and the bombe would then be restarted to continue looking for the cribs. When a stop resulted in the entire message making sense, you then had the message key and that key could be used to decipher all messages for that day.

That's why the Enigma operators were instructed to start each message with random characters.

The random characters the operator was supposed to create weren't really the start of the message, per se. The characters appeared as plaintext (they weren't encoded) in the message preamble, and the letters comprised what was called the message key. This was how the rotors were set at the beginning of encoding/decoding the message, and no message could be successfully decoded without knowing the particular key for that messsage. Given good cribs and sufficient time, the bombe could figure out the rotor selection and order and plugboard settings, which were the same for all messages for a given day. Once you knew that, and the starting position for a given message (the key), all messages for that day could be decoded.