Computer Science students screening of The Imitation Game

Princeton’s Garden Theater was filled with Princeton students on Tuesday night for a special screening of The Imitation Game, a new movie about events in the life of Alan Turing, who is widely known as the “father of computer science” and who is also credited with playing a crucial role in ending WWII by cracking the German Enigma code.

 

The movie is based on the book Alan Turing: The Enigma, by Andrew Hodges, which was reprinted in the US by Princeton University Press in conjunction with the Alan Turing Centennial event at Princeton’s Department of Computer Science in May 2012. The screening was arranged by the Press and Princeton’s Department of Computer Science by special arrangement with the Weinstein company.

 

Many of the students in the audience were taking a break from preparing for an exam in Princeton’s most popular course, COS 126. Developed by Princeton faculty members Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne, COS 126 now reaches over 60% of all Princeton students. Each year, 5-10 faculty and 15-20 graduate students teach the course in lectures and precepts to over 700 students, in three offerings. The course covers not just programming, but also basic precepts of the field, so most Princeton students are well aware of Turing’s importance. 

 

Computer science is also one of Princeton’s most popular majors, so the event was also well attended by undergraduate majors and graduate students in the department. 

 

The film was introduced in the two theaters by Professors Andrew Appel and Ed Felten of the Computer Science Department, who described Turing’s time in Princeton, where the passing of the torch from the mathematicians Godel and Church to the computer scientist. Turing opened the door for an understanding of what is possible with computation and the development of the computational infrastructure that surrounds us today.