The Imitation Game, a trolley problem [Media Notes 71]

Watched The Imitation Game (2014), which is about Alan Turing. The title has a double reference, of course. It refers both to the game that a homosexual had to play in order to get on with life in Britain, where homosexuality was deemed criminal, and, more overtly, to the so-called Turing Test. Turing proposed the test in the form of a game. A computer is to be programmed to imitate human behavior. A human then quizzes two unseen interlocutors, a human and a computer. If human interlocutors cannot reliably tell which is which, the computer is said to have passed the test.

The film centers on Turing’s activity as a code-breaker for the British during WWII. It switches back and forth between that, his childhood when he first became aware of his homosexuality, and his postwar arrest and conviction for it. That goes well enough, and Benedict Cumberbatch is excellent as Alan Turing.

But that’s not what interests me here, not quite. I’m interested in the problem that faced the British once they had, through Turing’s efforts, broken the German code. Turing realized that if the British took advantage of this success in the most straightforward way, by directly thwarting German attacks, that would betray their code-breaking success to the Germans. They would, in turn, change their code immediately and the code-breakers would have to start all over again. Their success would be short-lived.

The conundrum presented Turing with a so-called Trolley problem – look it up – the day of their breakthrough. They realize that they Germans are about to sink a convoy. Their first impulse is to inform the military and save the convoy. That’s when Turing realizes that they cannot do that. At the same time one of his team realizes that his brother is on one of the ships in the convey – can’t we save just that one ship? (Not a quote from the film.)

So, the Germans are playing the role of the out-of-control trolley. They threaten millions of British lives. Do we divert the “trolley” to save the one life, the brother, at the expense of those millions? Or do we sacrifice that one life (and his companions), to save millions?

I realize that this is not quite the trolley logic, but it is close enough. In this case our trolley, the Germans, threatens all the lives not just one, the brother, or the other, all the rest. But the nature of the choice this poses is, however, very trolley-like. By deliberately sacrificing one life you can save many. In the trolley problem as posed, the out-of-control trolley threatens a group of people, but not the one. In the case faced by Turing and his group, the one will die if they do nothing, as will all the millions.

But they don’t do nothing. Yes, they sacrifice the one, the brother. But then Turing devises a statistical strategy to fool the Germans. They continue to decode the messages, but they don’t stave off all of the attacks. They stave off some of them, on an apparently random basis. Thus they save British lives and stymie German efforts but do not betray their code-breaking success to the Germans.