Alan Turing

The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence

by Sebastian Mallaby;  · 30 Mar 2026  · 607pp  · 161,998 words

drawn to Goertzel’s willingness to call bullshit. For example, Goertzel showered contempt on the classic definition of machine intelligence, proposed by the British mathematician Alan Turing, which states that a computer program can be deemed intelligent when it can pass itself off as human. Goertzel countered that a successful WebMind wouldn

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recruit restless researchers. Hassabis warmed to the location for other reasons, too: The London Mathematical Society was next door, and Hassabis liked to imagine that Alan Turing’s spirit was still there, even as DeepMind built on his foundations.[25] If you wandered past the Mathematical Society, you came to a pedestrian

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same exact street, probably looking pretty much as I saw it, because the university buildings and the cobblestones had been there for centuries. “Isaac Newton, Alan Turing, all my heroes. I could feel them in the bones of the stone, their intellect and vision. They were almost calling out to me.” “And

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. “You don’t get it!” Bengio said fiercely. The next day delegates from twenty-eight countries convened at Bletchley Park, the Victorian country mansion where Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, had deciphered Nazi Germany’s Enigma code with the help of a contraption that hummed and banged like a machine

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. Sometimes Hassabis also referred to classical computers as “Turing machines,” and to himself as “Turing’s champion.” A classical or Turing computer, first proposed by Alan Turing in 1936, operates on bits of information, which express either zero or one. In contrast, quantum computers, which exist for now only in experimental versions

The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control

by Jacob Siegel  · 24 Mar 2026  · 348pp  · 103,246 words

,” wrote Leibniz. “Reason will be right beyond all doubt only when it is everywhere as clear and certain as only arithmetic has been until now.” * * * Alan Turing designed a universal computer that could solve any solvable problem. Though it existed only in his mind as an abstract thought experiment, the Turing machine

Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI

by Carissa Véliz  · 21 Apr 2026  · 503pp  · 129,255 words

are currently designed, are the ultimate bullshitters because they are made to be plausible with no regard for the truth. It probably didn’t cross Alan Turing’s mind that his thought experiment, the famous imitation game in which a machine tries to pass as a human being, would encourage companies to

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence

by George Zarkadakis  · 7 Mar 2016  · 405pp  · 117,219 words

do her outmost to deceive the judge into believing that she is the man. The judge must guess correctly who is who. The English mathematician Alan Turing, one of the fathers of Artificial Intelligence, proposed this test in a landmark 1950 paper,1 noting that if one were to slightly modify this

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for life? Or is there something beyond the metaphor, a deeper insight into the nature and cause of being and becoming? Ever since British mathematician Alan Turing wrote his seminal paper on machines imitating humans, various camps in computer science, robotics and Artificial Intelligence have been demarcated by the dichotomy between materialism

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mathematician, electronic engineer and cryptographer Claude Shannon (1916–2001). He worked as a cryptanalyst in the Second World War, and in early 1943 he met Alan Turing, who had been posted to Washington to work with the Americans on breaking the German naval codes. Like his English counterpart, Shannon is one of

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the brain could produce highly complex patterns by using many basic cells – called neurons – that are connected together. To do so they borrowed ideas from Alan Turing. Turing’s influence has been tremendous in America, and his ideas for calculating machines (the so-called ‘Turing machines’) provided an excellent theoretical framework for

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world picked up the gauntlet and knuckled down to working out a solution. Amongst them was a young Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge, called Alan Turing.8 His solution to the problem would constitute an act of sheer brilliance that would ensure the young English mathematician global recognition. But when Hilbert

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to the hope that an algorithm could beat Gödel’s horror-inspiring incompleteness theorem. Their hopes were dashed forever in 1936 with the publication of Alan Turing’s paper on computable numbers.16 Gödel buried the omnipotence of logic, but it was Turing who placed the tombstone over its grave forever. Turing

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computing for the first time. Punched cards would be reinvented a century later by computer pioneers, and tapes carrying symbols were to be used by Alan Turing in order to define the mathematical conceptualisation of the modern computer. There were three kinds of punch cards in the Analytical Engine designs and these

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means of symbolic logic. His discovery, and its subsequent expansion by Frege’s predicate logic, laid the foundations of modern computer languages. However, it was Alan Turing who linked logic and computational machines forevermore: the ‘Turing machine’ is in effect an Analytical Engine that processes a strip of tape with logical symbols

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design. Every piece of the puzzle was now falling into place. The mathematical description of a general computation machine was given a year earlier by Alan Turing in his 1936 paper ‘On Computational Numbers’. Thanks to Shannon and Turing, logic, mathematics, electronics and computers were coming together as one. In the twentieth

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. An assortment of linguists, crossword puzzle experts, papyrologists, chess champions and mathematicians from Cambridge and Oxford joined its ranks.3 Amongst them was the young Alan Turing. He would be instrumental in devising a machine that broke the Enigma code used by the German air force and navy. The problem that Turing

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bulb, electromechanical relays, the transistor and miniaturisation – facilitated the development of advanced electronics. Claude Shannon showed that logical rules could be executed using electronics, and Alan Turing, together with John von Neumann, demonstrated how to build electronic machines that solved (almost) any logical problem. And that was how the modern digital computer

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coins the term ‘robot’ in his play R.U.R. 1921: Ludwig Wittgenstein publishes Tractatus Logico-philosopicus. 1931: Kurt Gödel publishes The Incompleteness Theorem. 1937: Alan Turing invents the ‘Turing machine’. 1938: Claude Shannon demonstrates that symbolic logic can be implemented using electronic relays. 1941: Konrad Zuse constructs Z3, the first Turing

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-complete computer. 1942: Alan Turing and Claude Shannon work together at Bell Labs. 1943: Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts demonstrate the equivalence between electronics and neurons. 1943: IBM funds the

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general-purpose computer, is built. 1947: Invention of the transistor at Bell Labs. 1948: Norbert Wiener publishes Cybernetics. 1950: Alan Turing proposes the ‘Turing Test’. 1950: Isaac Asimov publishes I, Robot. 1952: Alan Turing commits suicide with cyanide-laced apple. 1952: Herman Carr produces the first one-dimensional MRI image. 1953: Claude Shannon hires

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity

by Byron Reese  · 23 Apr 2018  · 294pp  · 96,661 words

of London built the ten-thousand-pound machine Babbage proposed, and it worked flawlessly. Exit Babbage, who surmised that steam could power computing machines. Enter Alan Turing. Turing’s contribution at this point in our tale came in 1936, when he first described what we now call a Turing machine. Turing conceived

Silence on the Wire: A Field Guide to Passive Reconnaissance and Indirect Attacks

by Michal Zalewski  · 4 Apr 2005  · 412pp  · 104,864 words

we could come up with a detailed, sufficiently strict and yet flawless hypothetical model of what the program should be doing. Why? Well, in 1936, Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, proved by reductio ad absurdum (reduction to the absurd) that there can be no general method for determining an outcome

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] [100] [101] [102] [103] [104] [105] Chapter 15 [106] [107] Chapter 16 [108] [109] Chapter 17 [110] [111] [112] Chapter 18 [113] [114] [115] * * * [41] Alan Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Series 2, 42 (1936). [42] R.L. Rivest, A. Shamir

Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence

by James Bridle  · 6 Apr 2022  · 502pp  · 132,062 words

researchers, the Turing Test remains the most widely understood way of thinking about the capabilities of AI in the public consciousness. It was proposed by Alan Turing in a 1950 paper, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’. Turing thought that instead of questioning whether computers were truly intelligent, we could at least establish that

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am using – that we are all using – is based on something called a Turing machine. This is the model of a computer described theoretically by Alan Turing in 1936. It’s what’s called an ideal machine – ideal as in imaginary, but not necessarily perfect. The Turing machine was a thought experiment

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of Logic Based on Ordinals’, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Series 2, 45, 1939, pp. 161–228. 4. B. Jack Copeland and Diane Proudfoot, ‘Alan Turing’s Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science’, Scientific American, 280(4), April 1999, pp. 98–103; DOI: 10.1038/scientificamerican0499-98. 5. For a full account

You Are Not a Gadget

by Jaron Lanier  · 12 Jan 2010  · 224pp  · 64,156 words

a state religion. You need us to deify information to reinforce your faith. The Apple Falls Again It’s a mistake with a remarkable origin. Alan Turing articulated it, just before his suicide. Turing’s suicide is a touchy subject in computer science circles. There’s an aversion to talking about it

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

by James Gleick  · 1 Mar 2011  · 855pp  · 178,507 words

,’ to leave behind the given, to represent the transcendent, yet, as is self-evident, only in symbols.”♦ In 1943 the English mathematician and code breaker Alan Turing visited Bell Labs on a cryptographic mission and met Shannon sometimes over lunch, where they traded speculation on the future of artificial thinking machines. (“Shannon

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hopes that these tracks will meet. —Jon Barwise (1986)♦ AT THE HEIGHT OF THE WAR, in early 1943, two like-minded thinkers, Claude Shannon and Alan Turing, met daily at teatime in the Bell Labs cafeteria and said nothing to each other about their work, because it was secret.♦ Both men had

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themselves. Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace lay near the beginning of this tradition, though they were all but forgotten, and now the trail led to Alan Turing, who did something really outlandish: thought up a machine with ideal powers in the mental realm and showed what it could not do. His machine

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be proved nor disproved from within the system, it might conceivably be decided, as it were, by an outside referee—by external logic or rules.♦♦ Alan Turing, just twenty-two years old, unfamiliar with much of the relevant literature, so alone in his work habits that his professor worried about his becoming

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logic of his own mind. He imagined himself as a computer. He distilled mental procedures into their smallest constituent parts, the atoms of information processing. Alan Turing and Claude Shannon had codes in common. Turing encoded instructions as numbers. He encoded decimal numbers as zeroes and ones. Shannon made codes for genes

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Mark I. In Britain, still secret, the code breakers at Bletchley Park had gone on to build a vacuum-tube computing machine called the Colossus. Alan Turing was beginning work on another, at the University of Manchester. When the public learned about these machines, they were naturally thought of as “brains.” Everyone

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fundamental unit is a choice, and it is binary. “It is the least event that can be true or false.”♦ They also managed to attract Alan Turing, who published his own manifesto with a provocative opening statement—“I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’ ”♦—followed by a sly admission that

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which they are neatly sorted. The orderly states have low probability and low entropy. For impressive degrees of orderliness, the probabilities may be very low. Alan Turing once whimsically proposed a number N, defined as “the odds against a piece of chalk leaping across the room and writing a line of Shakespeare

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thermodynamic system, operating a piston in a cylinder of fluid. He pointed out that this device would need, in effect, “a sort of memory faculty.” (Alan Turing was now, in 1929, a teenager. In Turing’s terms, Szilárd was treating the mind of the demon as a computer with a two-state

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nature being nothing more than phonetic and photogenic structures.♦ The universe, which others called a library or an album, then came to resemble a computer. Alan Turing may have noticed this first: observing that the computer, like the universe, is best seen as a collection of states, and the state of the

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L. Bell, “Hermann Weyl on Intuition and the Continuum,” Philosophia Mathematica 8, no. 3 (2000): 261. ♦ “SHANNON WANTS TO FEED NOT JUST DATA”: Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (London: Vintage, 1992), 251. ♦ “OFF AND ON … I HAVE BEEN WORKING”: Letter, Shannon to Vannevar Bush, 16 February 1939, in Claude Elwood Shannon

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WORK: Shannon interview with Robert Price: “A Conversation with Claude Shannon: One Man’s Approach to Problem Solving,” IEEE Communications Magazine 22 (1984): 125; cf. Alan Turing to Claude Shannon, 3 June 1953, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. ♦ “NO, I’M NOT INTERESTED IN DEVELOPING A POWERFUL BRAIN”: Andrew Hodges

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Enigma (London: Vintage, 1992), 251. ♦ “A CONFIRMED SOLITARY”: Max H. A. Newman to Alonzo Church, 31 May 1936, quoted in Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing, 113. ♦ “THE JUSTIFICATION … LIES IN THE FACT”: Alan M. Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society

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, in Kurt Gödel: Collected Works, vol. 5, ed. Solomon Feferman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 147. ♦ “YOU SEE … THE FUNNY LITTLE ROUNDS”: letter from Alan Turing to his mother and father, summer 1923, AMT/K/1/3, Turing Digital Archive, http://www.turingarchive.org. ♦ “IN ELEMENTARY ARITHMETIC THE TWO-DIMENSIONAL CHARACTER

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and Pattern (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 535. ♦ “IT USED TO BE SUPPOSED IN SCIENCE”: “The Nature of Spirit,” unpublished essay, 1932, in Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing, 63. ♦ “ONE CAN PICTURE AN INDUSTRIOUS AND DILIGENT CLERK”: Herbert B. Enderton, “Elements of Recursion Theory,” in Jon Barwise, Handbook of Mathematical Logic (Amsterdam: North

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Holland, 1977), 529. ♦ “A LOT OF PARTICULAR AND INTERESTING CODES”: Alan Turing to Sara Turing, 14 October 1936, quoted in Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing, 120. ♦ “THE ENEMY KNOWS THE SYSTEM BEING USED”: “Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems” (1948), in Claude Elwood Shannon, Collected Papers

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“Avoiding All Personal Enquiries” of Molecules (London: Associated University Presses, 1995), 205. ♦ “THE ODDS AGAINST A PIECE OF CHALK”: Quoted by Andrew Hodges, “What Did Alan Turing Mean by ‘Machine,’?” in Philip Husbands et al., The Mechanical Mind in History (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 81. ♦ “AND YET NO WORK HAS BEEN

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Clare. “Seventeenth Century Calculating Machines.” Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation 1:1 (1943): 27–28. Aspray, William. “From Mathematical Constructivity to Computer Science: Alan Turing, John Von Neumann, and the Origins of Computer Science in Mathematical Logic.” PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1980. ———. “The Scientific Conceptualization of Information: A

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, Colo.: Westview Press, 2002. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, or, the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth, Eclesiasticall and Civill. London: Andrew Crooke, 1660. Hodges, Andrew. Alan Turing: The Enigma. London: Vintage, 1992. Hofstadter, Douglas R. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books, 1979. ———. Metamagical Themas: Questing for the

Architects of Intelligence

by Martin Ford  · 16 Nov 2018  · 586pp  · 186,548 words

passing the TURING TEST—in other words, these AI systems could carry out a conversation so that they would be indistinguishable from a human being. Alan Turing proposed this test in his 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, which arguably established artificial intelligence as a modern field of study. In other words

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, was that some of the people most associated with logic actually believed in the neural net paradigm. The biggest examples are John von Neumann and Alan Turing, who both thought that big networks of simulated neurons were a good way to study intelligence and figure out how those things work. However, the

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itself has been one of the main problem areas for AI research since the dawn of AI. Some of the early pioneers in AI like Alan Turing and Claude Shannon were very interested in computer chess. When I was 8 years old, I purchased my first computer using the winnings from the

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neocortex. Language is hierarchical; we can share the hierarchical ideas we have in our neocortex with each other using the hierarchy of language. I think Alan Turing was prescient in basing the Turing test on language because I think it does require the full range of human thinking and human intelligence to

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intelligence by looking at how humans grow into intelligence—a machine that starts as a baby and learns like a child—was famously introduced by Alan Turing in the same paper where he introduced the Turing test, so it could really be the oldest good idea in AI. Back in 1950, this

I Am a Strange Loop

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