The Imitation Game Christopher soon dies from tuberculosis. When Britain declares war on Germany in 1939, Turing travels to Bletchley Park. Under the direction of Commander Alastair Denniston, he joins the cryptography team of Hugh Alexander, John Cairncross, Peter Hilton, Keith Furman and Charles Richards. The team are trying to decrypt the Enigma machine, which the Nazis use to send coded messages. Turing is difficult to work with, and considers his colleagues inferior; he works alone to design a machine to decipher Enigma. After Denniston refuses to fund construction of the machine, Turing writes to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who puts Turing in
Enigma machine indicator procedures were two of the main weaknesses that made cracking Enigma possible. One of the earliest "indicator procedures" for the Enigma was cryptographically flawed and allowed Polish cryptanalysts to make the initial breaks into the plugboard Enigma. The procedure had the operator set his machine in accordance with the secret settings that all operators on the net shared. The settings included an initial position for the rotors (the "Grundstellung"), say, "AOH". The operator turned his rotors until "AOH" was visible through the rotor windows. At that point, the operator chose his own arbitrary starting position for the message he