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In this compelling episode of Science Goes to the Movies that airs on Cuny.tv., co-hosts Faith Salie and Dr. Heather Berlin are joined by cryptologist Rosario Gennaro to discuss The Imitation Game and Into the Woods.

Science Goes to the Movies Episode #102: The Imitation Game & Into the Woods from CUNY TV on Vimeo.

As excerpted from the show’s website:

With respect to The Imitation Game, they address a popular-culture rarity—a scientist who’s a war hero. Alan Turing’s massive contributions to the fields now called Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, including a method called “The Uncomputability Problem,” are carefully dissected. The importance of learning to reverse-engineer an algorithm, as Turing set out to do when he began to build his machine, also is explained. Prof. Gennaro references important details from Breaking the Code—a 1986 Broadway show and 1996 BBC drama about the Alan Turing story, both starring Derek Jacobi—that are omitted from The Imitation Game and ponders whether this material is too complex for effective drama. A discussion follows about where computer science might be today had Turing not died so early. For Into the Woods, the film adapted from the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical, the co-hosts and Prof. Gennaro look closely at the way in which Sondheim’s complex music works with natural pattern-recognition and “meaning-making” in the human brain, the neurology of rhymes, and the often musically induced phenomenon of “involuntary memory.” (Science Goes to the Movies is made possible by generous support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. (Taped: 02/26/15))