What Alan Turing Teaches us about Problem Solving
Occasionally the mind needs to wander, be allowed to stray from the familiar pasture and seek answers that are found where they are not expected. That is a lesson that "design thinking" teaches us. So it happened that after watching the movie "the Imitation Game" in which it's protagonist Alan Turing makes remarkable progress in problem solving, it seemed that the film offers inadvertently a set of instructive lessons about how to solve problems and how to design, neatly packaged for evening entertainment, no less.
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| Alan Turing, Mathematician |
Alan Turing was a British mathematical genius, who can be seen as the inventor of the computer (Turing Machine) and definitely was the one who broke the German WW II code which was produced with an encrypting machine called Enigma. Although dead since 1954 his name has been in the news lately because of a pardon Queen Elizabeth gave him posthumously in 2013 (he had been convicted of "indecency" because of homosexual contacts), and because the film "The Imitation Game", a chronicle of his life was released recently.
This impressive film streamlines the historic Turing story into the kind of drama that fits the model of a movie narrative; a more accurate chronicle of Turing may be found in Andrew Hodges book about him but the film account it easy to distill 10 general lessons about the design process.
1. Creative solutions don't happen in a command structure
The film gets a lot of mileage from contrasting the officers who want to enforce order, discipline and obedience with Turing who is impervious to their efforts. At one points he simply shrugs and says: "I think you need me much more than I need you." In the end the military system cannot come up with the solution to their problem (cracking the Nazi code) and has to tolerate the eccentricities of the mathematician, tinkerer, and autodidact. Today's creative industry prides itself in providing a seemingly less structured environment to foster playful creativity, but ping pong tables, pinball machines or bar stools are often contrived, creating an outward image that covers up the command structure that all too often persists.
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| Code breaking with a machine computing alternative options |
2. Even design by a genius needs teamwork
In the movie Turing is a Howard Roark type in the extreme, one for whom it is "my way or the highway.” (Apparently the historical Turing was much less socially handicapped). The film version of Turing soon has to learn that he won’t succeed if nobody likes him. Once he acts a bit more sociably, his team not only supports his work, they provide useful ideas and once even save him and his machine from the wrath of his commanding officer. This problem solving model is called co-evaluation (Maher).
- Women are also people
The person who teaches Turing that he needs to work with the team and not against it is a woman who has quite the brains. The film shows with great clarity how nearly impossible it was for women to play an equal role to men in 1940s Britain, the sexist expectations of what their roles should be were too stacked against them. One cannot help but imagine how much further humanity would be in its development if women hadn’t been held back like this through all of history.
- Design includes serendipity (and thrives in a bar)
Turing worked on the Classical Decision Problem
before becoming engaged with code breaking
As much as Turing is hard to distract from his single-minded focus on solving the encryption puzzle, the real breakthrough moments in the film all occur when he is disrupted and his mind has to take in some outside messages. In other words, he does not follow the strict "rational model" (f. Brooks). In fact, the film suggests that Turing got the key information that all encrypted morning messages start with the same formula through overhearing a conversation between women in a bar.
- Disruptive technology is incomprehensible to those who perfect the old pattern
The military and the cryptologists all believe that the way to go about breaking the code is the way they have always done it, by hand. Just faster and better. They continue to pursue this route even after calculating that it would take a million years to test all variations the Enigma machine could have used. Turing, by contrast sets on a never before used approach "the digital computer”. This is truly outside the box thinking, except that his cue really comes from the encryption machine itself, hence the title: The Imitation Game." The idea to out maneuver the same concept that creates the problem he wants to solve by using it for decoding seems so obvious, but like all disruption, it takes a leap to get it, a leap many refuse to take. As in all disruptive approaches, though, Turing does not know the path he will take when he sets out. He knows the problem and the goal but in between he has to discover as he goes.
- Social skills help to motivate a team
Teamwork cannot be forced by the mere insight that a team is better at problem solving than an individual. To engage a team and motivate it, it takes social skills, a trait that is often time seen in conflict with ingenuity. Even though the film is cartoonish in its approach to this subject, and suggests the cliché that women are so much better at social skills, it is time to recognize that intelligence has more facets than rational, mathematical thinking; thus the term "social intelligence" is very apt and appropriate.
- Interdisciplinary diversity helps in design and problem solving
[New ideas would come about] by connexion and transferring of the observations of one Arte, to the uses of another, when the experience of several misteries shall fall under consideration of one mans minde. (Sir Francic Bacon, 1609)
Even though Turing finds most of his colleagues irritating, in the end it is a team having various backgrounds, genders and interests that is necessary to move the project to fruition. Turing alludes to the benefit of diversity when he is interrogated by the police. The film may make stronger suggestions about diversity than the reality of Bletchley Park where the code breaking occurred and where all on the team were mathematicians.
- Ideology can ruin brilliant schemes
The film lets the Nazis start all the navy ship deployment messages with "Heil Hitler", the idiotic greeting then required in Germany. It is that repetitiveness that allows Turing and his team to drastically reduce the number of variations that the machine had to go through to decode the scrambled words. This narrative may be a simplification for the film but it beautifully demonstrates that simplistic templates, especially ideologically motivated ones, can become the pitfall of otherwise brilliant solutions.
- Competition fertilizes the thought process
Architects are familiar with the notion of a design competition. War, as in The Imitation Game, is quite a different kind of competition, yet, the element of competition as a accelerator and motivator to solve a problem permeates the film: The competition between Germany and Britain, for one, and also the race between the coders and the code breakers. Then, there is the very lopsided competition between those who apply the old methods and Turing who comes in and breaks the mold, the competition among those who apply for a job on Turing's team and then a competition of sorts between the different military ranks, between those for whom discipline is all and those who see opportunities where the boneheads see nothing. As in the real world, competition has the potential to derail and be destructive, but used at the right time, it can motivate and accelerate the finding of a solution.
- You are not done after solving the initial problem
In the film, the moment of solution is sudden, a true "eureka" moment that actually is rare in collaborative design. After the initial euphoria, a tense situation immediately arises when the group debates what to do with the decoded messages. Tell the superiors so that attacks can be thwarted or keep the code breaking a secret so as to not tip off the enemy? The solution that Britain actually picked in the given situation was a hybrid and the approach is telling. The Germans, convinced that their code could be broken, never suspected as much. The British, save for a few messages carefully acted upon, and a few deliberately leaked to the Soviets, tthe code breaking a secret, even for decades after the war. It is clear that this ruined Turing who never experienced the hero status he deserved. It is less clear if keeping the code-breaking Turing machine a secret put Britain at a disadvantage in the race towards the digital age in which free, interdisciplinary, competitive, and open idea generation allowed IBM to become the world leader.
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| Although Turing died with a supposedly cyanide laced apple next to his bed, the Apple logo is not related to Turing but to Newton |
Naturally, there are many other approaches and lessons for problem solving and design, especially in the field of "wicked problems" (Rittel), which are common in urban planning, for example crowd sourcing following the Wiki principle. Still, the film, without this really being the intent, shows beautiful universal lessons we all can use when approaching design problems. And to set the record straight – although Turing allegedly died from a poisoned apple, the Apple logo comes from Newton (who supposedly conceived of gravity under an apple tree), not Turing.
Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
edited by Ben Groff
Related Article on the Blog
What is Design Thinking?
What has Architecture to do with Quantum Physics?
External Sources
The New Yorker about Alan Turing 2006
Gottfried von Leibniz the decision Problem
The Classical Decision Problem
Fred Brooks: The Design of Design. (Interview)
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