The imitation game

The other day, Nick Hoskins posted a link to an intriguing puzzle, the Imitation Game Puzzle

I tried very hard not to click on the link. There was a picture of Alan Turing, a puzzle and a competition. Oh, and it was all run by the Chocolate Factory.

The Imitation Game film has just been released, hence the timing of the puzzle.

I clicked on the link. Pictures of the bombe's that were used to break Enigma in the Second World War. Another picture of Alan Turing and a little piece about the Turing Test.

In fact, one of the premises of the puzzle was to prove you are not a computer, in effect a reverse Turing Test.

I clicked on the link to download the pdf with the details of the puzzle. I was delighted to find what looked like a scan of a type-written document. This reminded me of working on puzzles with my mum.

My mum loved crosswords. Her favourite was to find a puzzle in The Guardian compiled by Araucaria. I can still recall her telling me how araucaria is the Latin name for tne monkey puzzle tree, with a twinkle in her eye.

At holiday times Araucaria would often create a special, puzzle. The puzzles could keep you amused for days. We would both take a look at them, get a few clues, then give up in despair. Mum would usually be more persistent than me. Maybe she would be cooking dinner and I would be sat talking to her in the kitchen. Happiness was solving a clue together.

One thing I learnt from this is that talking to others about problems helps you see them more clearly. My mind works that way for sure. It doesn't matter if the person you are talking fully understands, so long as they are engaged and interested it helps you find out what assumptions you are making, it raises questions and you get a second perspective on the problem.

Mum used to subscribe to special puzzles that Araucaria produced a few times a year. They would arrive in the post, printed on paper and looked like they were copies of an original from a type-writer -- just like the Imitation Game puzzle. I was hooked.

Earlier this year I visited Bletchley Park with my wife and family. The two boys are very interested in history and know way more than anyone of their age normally does about the world wars. Indeed, if a Turing Test was done on either of them you might well conclude that they are in fact computers since no human being could reasonably be expected to know as much as they do.

The visit to Bletchley was a bit disappointing, our timing was bad as they were just putting the finishing touches to some new exhibits so parts of the museum were closed. However, we did get to see the re-constructed bombe working. These bombe's were basically electro-mechanical special purpose parallel computers. They allowed vast numbers of enigma settings to be tried as the initial part of an attack on the Enigma ciphers.

The competition is still on-going, so I should not spoil the fun. Suffice to say, the puzzle came at just the right time for me.

I have been going through a very difficult time, so to be able to get away from everything for a few hours and immerse myself in the puzzle was very therapeutic.

My poor wife had to put up with an entire weekend of bizarre questions about a whole range of strange subjects. She was an immense help as I worked through the puzzle. I was reminded of sitting round the kitchen table with my mother, happy times indeed.

Araucaria would have been proud of this puzzle, many thanks to those at Google that created the puzzle and helped me through this very difficult time.