Now here is a great man of the computing world, Alan Turing, the British mathematician who is credited with breaking the codes of the World War II Enigma machine and is considering the founding father of computer science and the concept of Artificial Intelligence.

His story is set to be told and Benedict Cumberbatch looks set to play him in a story that tells the highs and lows of Turings life, from the amazing achievements he made for Britain and the world to the despicable way his life was destroyed for being homosexual.

Benedict Cumberbatch is picking up character and Hollywood roles alike in abandon, he's really managing to raise his profile from the excellent Sherlock and he's also managing to keep his roles diverse. Certainly playing Alan Turing would be another iconic role but also a great character role for him.

According to Deadline through The Guardian he's currently in talks to lead the film entitled The Imitation Game which we first heard about back in December 2011 from the Black List, the list of the executive's favourite unproduced scripts going round the studios. Graham Moore had written the script that was fast picked up for production, in fact we'd heard about the film before the Black List was released.

In October of 2011 Moore's script had already been picked up for production and along with it were a number of interesting names, Leonardo DiCaprio was interested in playing Turing and Ron Howard was apparently interested in directing, although it seemed awfully close to the idea of A Beautiful Mind and I'm not sure how much of that was press wild connections and how much as truth.

However none of that came to pass, the film has continued through production but not with those names attached. In December of last year we heard that Morten Tyldum, the director of the excellent Headhunters (Filmstalker Review), was set to direct The Imitation Game, an interesting and curious choice.

A good sign here though is that it's not being turned into the Hollywood film version of his life and it feels as though it might stay very British, although perhaps a little more European, but retain the truth of it all.

I'm going to include a few paragraphs I previously wrote about Turing as I still think this covers it all:

Alan Turing was a great man, full stop. He was a mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist and developed many concepts, machines and processes used in computer science well after his death. Not only is he credited with helping break many German codes during the war as he worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, but he was the man behind the breaking of the Enigma machine, created the designed for the first stored computer program, and predicted chemical reactions that were observed after his death.

He was a great man, and undoubtedly he saved many lives during the war and perhaps helped shorten it. For that he received an OBE and became a Fellow of the Royal Society, and quite frankly he should have received much, much more.

Except he was a homosexual, and for that the government had dispensed with his services and the courts decreed he could either receive injections of oestrogen to curb his desires or go to prison. This began his personal struggles and in 1954 he died. The post-mortem determined he'd committed suicide by cyanide, but his mother still protests that and says it was accidental after an experiment went wrong.

Whatever the real reason, he was betrayed and forgotten by his country who, you could say, were directly responsible for his downfall and death, despite his obvious patriotism and the great things he did for Britain.