THE IMITATION GAME
The Story of a Mathematical Genius: Alan Turing
The Oscar-winning The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley tells the story of how a mathematical genius changed the course of World War II. As the war rages on and the Germans get closer to success by organizing raids, British intelligence hires a group of academics led by Alan Turing to decipher the ‘enigma’ code in which the Germans hide their information. Turing puts a puzzle and a job advertisement in the newspaper to gather clever people all over the country, through which he meets Joan (Keira Knightley). To decode this code whose encryption system changes every twenty-four hours, the protagonists would need more than Britain’s smartest people: artificial intelligence.
This movie whose tempo never falls and flows in one breath successfully manages to create its own world with exciting, and at times humorous lines. The film, with an IMBD score of 8, successfully captures the mood of Alan Turing. While creating a nice sense of tension to the audience, it also tells the struggle of human identity through Turing’s own story.
There is also an important reason why the title of the movie is The Imitation Game. The first sentence of Turing, the creator of the well-known Turing Test, published in The Mind magazine right after World War II, is as follows: “I propose to discuss the question” Can machines think? “”
What if one day we were all blind one by one? What if we had a ‘blindness pandemic’, so to speak?
Jose Saramago states that he started to write the book Blindness with these questions falling on his mind one day. An unnamed man waiting at a red light in an unnamed city suddenly becomes blind. He goes to an ophthalmologist to resolve this unexpected blindness. As the day goes on, everyone in the city slowly starts to go blind. The effects of this pandemic in the society makes the reader think that Saramago actually wants to portray the moral blindness in the society with Blindness. This book, which can sometimes put bumps in one’s throat with its depressing atmosphere and tension, actually offers a good opportunity for people to come to terms with the situation we are experiencing right now. In an unnamed character and a non-dialogue narrative, the author explains very well how the strict lines we perceive as “normal” in our lives can change with a small thing. Blindness is an excellent book to read in this period because the universe the book describes is not that different from today. This Nobel laureate book is indeed an universal depiction of the vaccine wars, toilet paper fights, and economic unrest as the scapegoat became the first covid patient.