The Surprising Connection Between Alan Turing's Imitation Game & Your Garth Brooks Tickets

In the Oscar-nominated film The Imitation Game, the machine that helped decrypt an “unbreakable” Nazi code during World War II was very much the product of Alan Turing’s enigmatic brilliance.

Germany’s military relied upon a continuous and confidential flow of data on infantry maneuvers, ship movements, supplies of food and ammunition, as well as orders to the field from senior commanders. Enigma machines were used to send and receive incredibly complex encrypted messages with absolute confidence in the security of the transmissions. Turing and his co-workers at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire devised a cryptanalytic device that enabled the Allies to decrypt and act upon German intelligence so quickly and thoroughly, it was almost as if London had been cc’d on every message. It is indisputable that Turing and his team helped win World War II.

Turing quite obviously was brilliant. He was a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence. He believed it would be possible to develop computing machinery that could be taught to think, and could provide replies to questions that would be indecipherable from a human’s.

More than 70 years after Alan Turing’s tragic death, “the Turing test” is still a standard in the field of artificial intelligence. If a computer can fool a human into believing it’s another human, it passes the test.

So what does this have to do with Garth Brooks tickets?

Businesses that sell tickets online are regularly beset by resellers who use massively coordinated computer-buying to grab large quantities of tickets for concerts (like Garth Brooks) and sporting events before the general public can buy their individual tickets. This results in shrunken availability and higher prices. To prevent this, the sellers attempt to block computers by forcing each buyer to prove that he or she is human - through the use of a CAPTCHA – which is the term used for the image shown above.

When you encounter a CAPTCHA, a garbled-looking word or two is typically displayed, and you must prove your flesh and blood existence by spelling the letters from your keyboard or touchpad.

CAPTCHA is an acronym for a process developed by a team at Carnegie Mellon University in 2000. In addition to their brilliance, the Carnegie Mellon team clearly had both a sense of humor and a sense of reverence, as indicated by the meaning of their acronym:

Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.

The CAPTCHA process is actually a reverse Turing test. Instead of a computer trying to convince you that it’s human, you “win” by convincing a computer that you’re not another computer.

In all likelihood, you’ve played this version of Alan Turing’s imitation game well before you enjoyed the movie about his remarkable achievement in World War II. (And if you haven’t yet seen the movie, get there)!

Originally posted to LinkedIn on February 18 2015