DiCaprio to play Alan Turing in a new biographic film...

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 00:56:16 -0400
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Full Title: DiCaprio to play Alan Turing in a new biographic film ‘The Imitation Game’

Warner Brothers is said to have purchased the rights to a script The Imitation Game by screenwriter Graham Moore about British mathematician Alan Turing who made many important contributions to computer science. Leonardo DiCaprio is supposedly interested in playing Turing and is "chasing the project" and Ron Howard is rumored to be interested in in directing. The script is based on the Andrew Hodges' 2000 biography Alan Turing: The Enigma.

Turing is the famous English mathematician who made significant contributions to computer science in the 30s and 40s, including formalizations of computing and algorithms with the Turing machine and early work on Artificial Intelligence. During World War II he was was also a senior member of the British codebreaking and cryptanalysis group at Bletchley Park that broke the codes for the German Enigma machine.

Turing was prosecuted by the British government in 1952 for being a homosexual which is thought to be the cause of his apparent suicide by cyanide poisoning in 1954. In 2009, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologized on behalf of the British government for the way in which Turing was treated after the war.