Alan Turing

Turing's Cathedral

by George Dyson  · 6 Mar 2012

cathedral : the origins of the digital universe/George Dyson. p. cm. Includes index. Summary: “In a revealing account of John von Neumann’s realization of Alan Turing’s Universal Machine, George Dyson vividly illuminates the nature of digital computers, the lives of those who brought them into existence, and how code took

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nucleus: less memory than is allocated to displaying a single icon on a computer screen today. Von Neumann’s project was the physical realization of Alan Turing’s Universal Machine, a theoretical construct invented in 1936. It was not the first computer. It was not even the second or third computer. It

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, and became the machine whose coding was most widely replicated and whose logical architecture was most widely reproduced. The stored-program computer, as conceived by Alan Turing and delivered by John von Neumann, broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things. Our universe would never be the

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to be speeding up. To an observer in the digital universe, our universe appears to be slowing down. Universal codes and universal machines, introduced by Alan Turing in his “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” of 1936, have prospered to such an extent that Turing’s underlying interest in

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), Herman Goldstine’s The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann (1972), Nicholas Metropolis’s History of Computing in the Twentieth Century (1980), Andrew Hodges’s Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983), Rolf Herken’s The Universal Turing Machine: A Half-Century Survey (1988), and William Aspray’s John von Neumann and the Origins

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ECP during 1946–1956. Irving John (Jack) Good (born Isadore Jacob Gudak; 1916–2009): British American Bayesian statistician, artificial intelligence pioneer, cryptologist, and assistant to Alan Turing during the British code-breaking effort in World War II. Leslie Richard Groves (1896–1970): U.S. Army general, commander of Los Alamos during World

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(1892–1977): American mathematician; sixth professor to be hired at the IAS. Maxwell Herman Alexander Newman (1897–1984): British topologist, computer pioneer, and mentor to Alan Turing. J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967): Physicist; Los Alamos National Laboratory director during World War II and director of the IAS, 1947–1966. William Penn (1644

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, were exchanged at the speed of punched cards and paper tape. Each island in the new archipelago constituted a universe unto itself. In 1936, logician Alan Turing had formalized the powers (and limitations) of digital computers by giving a precise description of a class of devices (including an obedient human being) that

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. Hilbert’s challenge, taken up by von Neumann, led directly both to Kurt Gödel’s results on the incompleteness of formal systems of 1931 and Alan Turing’s results on the existence of noncomputable functions (and universal computation) of 1936. Von Neumann set the stage for these two revolutions, but missed taking

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eliminate intuition, and leave only ingenuity. We do not mind how much ingenuity is required, and therefore assume it to be available in unlimited supply. —Alan Turing, 1939 “THE PROSPECT of a visit from an architect usually costs Professor Veblen a day’s work and a night’s sleep,” noted Abraham Flexner

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set the stage for the digital revolution, not only by redefining the powers of formal systems—and lining things up for their physical embodiment by Alan Turing—but by steering von Neumann’s interests from pure logic to applied. It was while attempting to extend Gödel’s results to a more general

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proofs in formal logics! Did you hear about this?” von Neumann wrote to Stan Ulam in May of 1941. “Please send Gödel continuum hypothesis notes,” Alan Turing cabled from King’s College, Cambridge, on December 16.26 Proposed by George Cantor in 1877, and presented in 1900 as the first of Hilbert

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—and a draft report, delivered by hand to Goldstine—from British radar pioneers Frederic C. Williams and Tom Kilburn, who were engaged, with assistance from Alan Turing and Max Newman, in building a prototype stored-program digital computer at Manchester University, based in part on the EDVAC report. In place of acoustic

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we are in the procreation of children: rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates. —Alan Turing, 1950 THE HISTORY OF DIGITAL computing can be divided into an Old Testament whose prophets, led by Leibniz, supplied the logic, and a New Testament

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whose prophets, led by von Neumann, built the machines. Alan Turing arrived in between. Twenty-four years old, Turing boarded the Cunard White Star Liner Berengaria bound for New York on September 23, 1936. His mother

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Oz, “I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” What the Americans termed “artificial intelligence” the British termed “mechanical intelligence,” a designation that Alan Turing considered more precise. We began by observing intelligent behavior (such as language, vision, goal-seeking, and pattern-recognition) in organisms, and struggled to reproduce this

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monument, however, has turned out not to be as coldly legible as it first appeared. There will always be truth beyond the reach of proof. Alan Turing received the Order of the British Empire in 1946, yet, under the Official Secrets Act, he could never talk openly about his wartime work. After

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signed “TWL”) concludes with the following statement: “There must be something about this code that you haven’t explained yet.” KEY TO ARCHIVAL SOURCES AMT Alan Turing papers, King’s College Archives, Cambridge, UK CBI Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Mn. FJD Freeman Dyson papers, courtesy of Freeman Dyson GBD

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. 5. U.S. Office of Naval Research, A Survey of Automatic Digital Computers—1953 (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Navy, compiled February 1953). 6. Alan Turing, “Lecture to the London Mathematical Society on 20 February 1947,” p. 1, AMT. 7. Memorandum for the Electronic Computer Project, November 9, 1949, IAS. 8

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. Presper Eckert, interview with Nancy Stern, October 28, 1977, CBI, call no. OH 13. 70. Stanley Frankel to Brian Randell, 1972, in Brian Randell, “On Alan Turing and the Origins of Digital Computers,” Machine Intelligence 7 (1972): 10. 71. Klára von Neumann, The Computer, ca. 1963, KVN. SIX: FULD 219 1. Abraham

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Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution: A Symposium Held at the Wistar Institute, April 25–26, 1966 (Philadelphia: Wistar Institute, 1966), p. 67; Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59, no. 236 (October 1950): 456. 52. George Church, West Hollywood, Calif., July 26, 2009, EDGE Foundation, “A Short Course

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-short-course-on-synthetic-genomics). THIRTEEN: TURING’S CATHEDRAL 1. Sara Turing, Alan M. Turing (Cambridge, UK: W. Heffer and Sons, 1959), p. 11. 2. Alan Turing to Sara Turing, aboard Cunard White Start Berengaria, September 28, 1936, AMT. 3. Sara Turing, Alan M. Turing, p. 11. 4. Ibid., pp. 11, 23

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, 27, and 29. 5. Alan Turing to Sara Turing, September 28, 1936, AMT. 6. Alan Turing to Philip Hall, November 22, 1936, AMT. 7. John von Neumann to Oswald Veblen, July 6, 1935, OVLC. 8. Ibid. 9

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Confluence of Ideas in 1936,” in Rolf Herken, ed., The Universal Turing Machine: A Half-Century Survey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 85. 11. Alan Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, ser. 2, vol. 42 (1936–1937): 230. 12. Ibid., p

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, and Computer Pioneer,” p. 178; Max Newman to Alonzo Church, May 31, 1936, in Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), pp. 111–12. 16. Alan Turing to Sara Turing, October 6, 1936, AMT; Alan Turing to Sara Turing, February 22, 1937, AMT. 17. Freeman Dyson, interview with author, May 5

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Stern; Julian Bigelow, interview with Nancy Stern. 22. Julian Bigelow, interview with Nancy Stern. 23. Malcolm MacPhail to Andrew Hodges, December 17, 1977, in Hodges, Alan Turing, p. 138. 24. Turing, “Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals,” p. 161. 25. Ibid., pp. 172–73. 26. Ibid., pp. 214–15. 27. Ibid., p

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. 215. 28. Alan Turing to Sara Turing, October 14, 1936, AMT. 29. Alan Turing to Philip Hall, n.d., ca. 1938, AMT. 30. I. J. Good, “Pioneering Work on Computers at Bletchley,” in Metropolis, Howlett

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–73; I. J. Good to Lee A. Gladwin, June 18, 2002, in “Cryptanalytic Co-operation Between the UK and the USA,” in Christof Teuscher, ed., Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker (New York: Springer-Verlag, 2002), p. 472. 35. John R. Womersley, Mathematics Division, National Physical Laboratory, “A.C

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. Project: Origin and Early History,” November 26, 1946, AMT. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Max Newman to John von Neumann, February 8, 1946, VNLC. 39. Alan Turing, “Report on visit to U.S.A., January 1st–20th, 1947,” AMT. 40. Sara Turing, Alan M. Turing, p. 56. 41

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Electronic Calculator,” n.d., ca. 1946, p. 19, AMT. 42. Sara Turing, Alan M. Turing, p. 78. 43. Alan Turing, “Proposed Electronic Calculator,” p. 47; Alan Turing, “Lecture to the London Mathematical Society on 20 February 1947,” p. 9. 44. J. H. Wilkinson, “Turing’s Work at the National Physical Laboratory,” in

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., A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century, p. 111. 45. Charles G. Darwin [NPL] to Sir Edward V. Appleton, July 23, 1947, AMT. 46. Alan Turing, “Intelligent Machinery,” report submitted to the National Physical Laboratory, 1948, p. 1, AMT. 47. Turing, “Lecture to the London Mathematical Society on 20 February 1947

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, “Ethical Machines,” prepared for the Tenth Machine Intelligence Workshop, Case Western Reserve University, April 20–25, 1981, unpublished draft, October 7, 1980, p. ix. 55. Alan Turing to I. J. Good, September 18, 1948, AMT. 56. I. J. Good, “Speculations on Perceptrons and Other Automata,” IBM Research Lecture RC-115, June 2

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evolution code (terminating at memory location 18,8) is run for the first time. (Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center, Institute for Advanced Study) Alan Turing at age five. (King’s College Archive, Cambridge; courtesy of the Turing family) John von Neumann at age seven. (Nicholas Vonneumann and Marina von Neumann

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Whitman) Alan Turing’s “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” was published in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society shortly after Turing’s arrival

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with a sequence stored on external punched paper tape by scanning at high speed with photoelectric reading heads. (National Archives Image Library, Kew, U.K.) Alan Turing (far left) in 1946. With the war over, Turing began designing the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) to be constructed at the National Physical Laboratory in

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, Mariette (Kövesi) von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, Amelia Frank Wigner, John von Neumann, Edward Teller, and, on the floor, Howard Percy (“Bob”) Robertson (teaching relativity to Alan Turing at the time). Except for physicists H. P. Robertson (from Hoquiam, Washington) and Amelia Frank (from Madison, Wisconsin), the celebrants on this occasion, probably during

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a Will but capable of only Two Ideas,” proposed by Lewis Fry Richardson in a 1930 study that raised the possibility, later taken up by Alan Turing, that random electronic indeterminacy could be amplified into creative thinking and even free will. (Lewis Fry Richardson, “The Analogy Between Mental Images and Sparks,” Psychological

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probably one species, expands to the whole gene universe,” Barricelli reported in August 1953. (Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center, Institute for Advanced Study) Alan Turing (standing) with Brian Pollard (left) and Keith Lonsdale (right) seated at the console of the Ferranti Mark 1 computer at the University of Manchester in

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

A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman  · 17 Jul 2017  · 415pp  · 114,840 words

“possibly the most important, and also the most famous, master’s thesis of the century” brought him into contact and collaboration with thinkers like Bush, Alan Turing, and John von Neumann: all, like Shannon, founders of our era. It brought him into often-reluctant cooperation with the American defense establishment and into

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access to the entire logical universe he described. “The laws of thought” had been extended to the inanimate world. That same year, the British mathematician Alan Turing published a famously critical step toward machine intelligence. He had proven that any solvable mathematical problem could, in principle, be solved by machine. He had

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kW of power for 1 milliwatt of poor-quality speech.”) But on the other hand, none of that mattered. Andrew Hodges, in his biography of Alan Turing, noted the obvious reason why: “It worked, which was the main thing. For the first time, secret speech could cross the Atlantic.” * * * At the heart

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and forth.” 12 * * * * * * Turing Shannon’s cryptography work had one other lasting import: it brought him into contact with another giant of the digital age, Alan Turing. In 1942, Turing came to America as a part of a government-initiated tour of military encryption projects. By this point, his reputation preceded him

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: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop, The Machine Speaks (Chicago: Stop Smiling Books, 2011), 63. “Members working on the job”: Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 247. “It worked”: Ibid., 312. “At a recent world fair”: Bush, “As We May Think.” “Phrt fdygui

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, February 28, 1977. “a very down to earth discipline”: Shannon, interviewed by Hagemeyer, February 28, 1977. Chapter 12: Turing “Here [Turing] met a person”: Hodges, Alan Turing, 314. “I think Turing had” . . . “We talked not at all”: Price, “Oral History: Claude E. Shannon.” “I reached New York” . . . “I had been intending

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”: Alan Turing, “Alan Turing’s Report from Washington DC, November 1942.” “incomplete alliance”: Andrew Hodges, “Alan Turing as UK-USA Link, 1942 Onwards,” Alan Turing Internet Scrapbook, www.turing.org.uk/scrapbook/ukusa.html. “I am persuaded”: Turing, “Alan Turing’s Report from Washington DC, November 1942.” “we would talk

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SIGINT Background.” National Security Agency. www.nsa.gov/public_info/declass/korean_war/sigint_bg.shtml. Hodges, Andrew. Alan Turing: The Enigma. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983. ———. “Alan Turing as UK-USA Link, 1942 Onwards.” Alan Turing Internet Scrapbook. www.turing.org.uk/scrapbook/ukusa.html. Horgan, John. “Claude E. Shannon: Unicyclist, Juggler, and Father

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to Farm and Ranch.” Farm Collector, September 2003. Tribus, Myron, and Edward C. McIrving. “Energy and Information.” Scientific American 225 (1971): 179–88. Turing, Alan. “Alan Turing’s Report from Washington DC, November 1942.” Van den Herik, H. J. “An Interview with Claude Shannon (September 25, 1980 in Linz, Austria).” ICCA Journal

AI in Museums: Reflections, Perspectives and Applications

by Sonja Thiel and Johannes C. Bernhardt  · 31 Dec 2023  · 321pp  · 113,564 words

the cultural sector (Hochscherf/Lätzel 2023). 12 AI in Museums There is no such thing as one artificial intelligence. In his fundamental study of 1950, Alan Turing argued that the thinking of intelligent humans could not be precisely defined and therefore any output of a machine that cannot be recognized as such

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(Goldie 2000). Operating based on such conceptual confusion and reduction of a full-fledged conception of a person can be attributed to the role that Alan Turing and his Turing test played in the tradition of the development of artificial intelligence with respect to the concept it embodies. In his classic paper

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have the experience of being creative, we also do not have a straightforward understanding or a precise criterion for what being creative means for humans. Alan Turing already presented a similar argument against a psychological approach to the question of whether computers can think. In his view, the problem is not so

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I came across during my exploratory research. Gaia/Boiano/Borda (2019) have already traced the historical emergence of museum chatbots back to the work of Alan Turing and to early chatbots such as Eliza, developed by Joseph Weizenbaum. Today, museum chatbots are emerging against the backdrop of increasingly sophisticated ‘conversational interfaces’ (Bunz

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds

by Daniel C. Dennett  · 7 Feb 2017  · 573pp  · 157,767 words

of life that makes all this possible, we can appreciate a second strange inversion of reasoning, achieved almost a century later by another brilliant Englishman: Alan Turing. Here is Turing’s strange inversion, put in language borrowed from Beverley: IN ORDER TO BE A PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL COMPUTING MACHINE, IT IS NOT

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of Oak Ridge and GOFAI After seventy years there are still secrets about World War II that have yet to emerge. The heroic achievements of Alan Turing in breaking the German Enigma code at Bletchley Park are now properly celebrated even while some of the details are still considered too sensitive to

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developmental controls to accomplish this redesign do count. 27The Ratio Club, founded in 1949 by the neurologist John Bates at Cambridge University, included Donald MacKay, Alan Turing, Grey Walter, I. J. Good, William Ross Ashby, and Horace Barlow, among others. Imagine what their meetings must have been like! 28Science has hugely expanded

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Ourselves to Expect: The Bayesian Brain as a Projector.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (3): 209–210. —. 2013d. “Turing’s ‘Strange Inversion of Reasoning.’” In Alan Turing: His Work and Impact, edited by S. Barry Cooper and J. van Leeuwen, 569–573. Amsterdam: Elsevier. —. 2014. “Daniel Dennett on Free Will Worth Wanting

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence

by Ray Kurzweil  · 31 Dec 1998  · 696pp  · 143,736 words

the first electrical calculating equipment was used in the 1890 census, it was not until the mid-1960s that this phenomenon was even noticed (although Alan Turing had an inkling of it in 1950). Even then, it was appreciated only by a small community of computer engineers and scientists. Today, you have

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Is as Thinking Does Oh yes, there is one other view, which I call the “thinking is as thinking does” school. In a 1950 paper, Alan Turing describes his concept of the Turing Test, in which a human judge interviews both a computer and one or more human foils using terminals (so

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with a stored program, self-modifying code, addressable memory, conditional branching, and computer programming itself still form the basis of computers today.4 Again, Enter Alan Turing By 1940, Hitler had the mainland of Europe in his grasp, and England was preparing for an anticipated invasion. The British government organized its best

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mathematicians and electrical engineers, under the intellectual leadership of Alan Turing, with the mission of cracking the German military code. It was recognized that with the German air force enjoying superiority in the skies, failure to

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to solve a surprisingly wide range of intelligent problems is exactly this: simple methods combined with heavy doses of computation (itself a simple process, as Alan Turing demonstrated in 1936 with his conception of the Turing Machine,16 an elegant model of computation) and examples of the problem. In some cases, we

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education, for medical students, and for people who just want to play doctor. Philosophy There is renewed interest in the Turing Test, first proposed by Alan Turing in 1950 as a means for testing intelligence in a machine. Recall that the Turing Test contemplates a situation in which a human judge interviews

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through the barrier and accounts for the “semi” conductor properties of a transistor. Turing machine A simple abstract model of a computing machine, designed by Alan Turing in his 1936 paper “On Computable Numbers.” The Turing machine is a fundamental concept in the theory of computation. Turing Test A procedure proposed by

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Alan Turing in 1950 for determining whether or not a system (generally a computer) has achieved human-level intelligence, based on whether it can deceive a human

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computation. Russell and Whitehead did not explicitly talk about computers but cast their ideas in the mathematical terminology of set theory. It was left to Alan Turing to create the first theoretical computer in 1936, in his Turing machine (see note 16 below). Alfred N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica, 3

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and Language (San Francisco: W H. Freeman, 1973). 15 Haneef A. Fatmi and R. W Young, “A Definition of Intelligence,” Nature 228 (1970): 97. 16 Alan Turing showed that the essential basis of computation could be modeled with a very simple theoretical machine. He created the first theoretical computer in 1936 (first

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Institution Press, 1986. Hoage, R. J. and Larry Goldman. Animal Intelligence: Insights into the Animal Mind. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986. Hodges, Andrew. Alan Turing: The Enigma. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983. Hoel, Paul G., Sidney C. Port, and Charles J. Stone. Introduction to Stochastic Processes. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin

The Man Who Invented the Computer

by Jane Smiley  · 18 Oct 2010  · 253pp  · 80,074 words

v3.1 Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two faculties, which we may call intuition and ingenuity. —Alan Turing, “Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals,” 1939 Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Epigraph Introduction Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter

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story can only be told in the context of other stories, because in that December of 1937, others too were pondering the difficulties of calculation. Alan Turing, a visiting fellow at Princeton, was wondering if the Liverpool tide-predicting machine, a system of pulleys and gears used to measure and predict tides

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of machine, and the genius of each was idiosyncratically formed by temperament, education, family history, by restrictions as well as by opportunities. In some ways, Alan Turing was Atanasoff’s precise opposite, drawn to pure mathematics rather than practical physics, educated to think rather than to tinker, disorganized in his approach rather

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that he once again could not accept. In 1929, when John Vincent Atanasoff was working on his PhD in physics at the University of Wisconsin, Alan Turing, seventeen (born June 23, 1912), was sitting for his Higher School Certificate examination. The examiner who evaluated his mathematics paper wrote, “He appeared to lack

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by the other boys. He tried to continue chemistry experiments there, but this was doubly hated, as showing a swottish mentality, and producing nasty smells.” Alan Turing was from long lines of inventive people on his mother’s side and his father’s side, and he showed a ready and determined fascination

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was moving in the wrong direction—toward greater and greater abstraction—while physicists continued to be interested in concrete problems. In the meantime, Alan Turing was wrestling with similar dissatisfactions. Alan Turing’s life at Sherborne was punctuated at the end with tragedy—in the winter of his last year (1930), his dearest friend

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that no longer interested Atanasoff. To many mathematicians of the period, the Entscheidungsproblem seemed to point toward concepts that were psychological, epistemological, or even theological. Alan Turing’s answer to the problem was no—there was no algorithm that could determine the truth of every mathematical statement. He was preempted by a

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Machines—offered a bridge, a connection between abstract symbols and the physical world. Indeed, his imagery was, for Cambridge, almost shockingly industrial.” In May 1936, Alan Turing submitted his paper, entitled “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” to the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society and then applied unsuccessfully

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not think like either Atanasoff or Turing. Chapter Three Although Atanasoff made every effort to find out about what calculating machines were being invented, and Alan Turing was as well connected as a mathematician could be, neither one of them was, or perhaps could have been, familiar with Konrad Zuse, an inventor

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—for his senior school project, he had designed a city of the future (à la Fritz Lang’s Metropolis) based on a hexagonal grid. Like Alan Turing, Zuse was educated in a system that focused on a child’s emotional and philosophical life as well as his intellectual life, and at the

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considering the dielectric constant of helium in his PhD dissertation, he was calculating the reduction in electric field strength caused by the presence of helium. Alan Turing was familiar with them, too—when he could make no progress finding the dielectric constant of water—that is, in calculating how effective water is

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was constructed and ready to test within a few months. Once his paper “On Computable Numbers” was completed and published in the spring of 1936, Alan Turing’s world expanded again—by the end of that September, he was at Princeton, enjoying (or not) a graduate fellowship there and meeting some of

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even if it did not work in the real world; Turing disagreed. Turing also began thinking again about the Liverpool tide-predicting machine. The machine Alan Turing was thinking of (and received forty pounds sterling to develop) would use weights and counterweights attached to rotating gears to set up problems. Their solutions

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, Turing went to Bletchley Park to aid in the breaking of the Enigma. Yet another, and still more obscure, inventor of the computer, one whom Alan Turing would soon know very well, was Tommy Flowers. He was an engineer at the General Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill in northwest London

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operations. There was, however, another more complex encoding system that the Germans were working with, which the English decoders at Bletchley Park called “Tunny.” When Alan Turing grew famous in the 1980s, almost all of the information concerning the importance of Tunny and its solution at Bletchley Park was still secret. These

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breaking of the Tunny codes at Bletchley Park would shape computer history but would remain top secret until the 1990s, long after the death of Alan Turing and long after most historians and students had come to what turns out to be a misunderstanding of the progress of World War II. Certain

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J. Watson, Jr., later said, “If Aiken and my father had had revolvers they would both have been dead.” Hard feelings lingered for years afterward. Alan Turing is now a famous man—the subject of biographies, papers, an opera, and at least one play, but his work at Bletchley Park breaking the

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. W. Winterbotham, The Ultra Secret, 1974; A. Cave Brown, Bodyguard of Lies, 1975), or in specialized publications that did mention him directly (Brian Randell, “On Alan Turing and the Origins of Digital Computers,” 1972; Brian Randell, editor, The Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers, 1973). Various accounts culminated in an episode about

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, the frantic chatter of a motor run, even the ludicrous frenzy of hosts of bogus scores. Flowers invented Colossus, but he also gave credit to Alan Turing for his contribution. At a conference in 1980, Flowers saw a young man reading the book that grew out of the BBC series The Secret

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) Konrad Zuse’s Z1 computer, built in his parents’ Berlin apartment c. 1936. (Courtesy of Horst Zuse) Konrad Zuse, 1910–1995. (Courtesy of Horst Zuse) Alan Turing, 1912–1954, upon his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1951. (© National Portrait Gallery, London) Bletchley Park staff at work on deciphering

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later he was given a professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study, along with Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel. It was there that he met Alan Turing, to whom he offered the job as research assistant in 1938. Clearly, von Neumann’s personality and biography meshed to produce a man who was

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and—not to be forgotten—the childish laughter of my first son were not exactly conducive to analysing the world into yes/no values.” Like Alan Turing, and at around the same time, Zuse began to think about the nature of the mind, the nature of human free will, and even the

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my part. Little or none of that would have been possible had Colossus been known. One person who, of course, knew all about Colossus was Alan Turing. The end of the war meant that Turing had several options available to him. In June 1945, he received an Order of the British Empire

…

had been learned through Colossus without acknowledging that Colossus had ever existed. The third important figure in the Bletchley Park computer story was Max Newman, Alan Turing’s old professor from Cambridge, from whom he had taken a course in the foundations of mathematics in 1935. It was as a result of

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8,” restricting the public relations potential, and therefore sales, of the Manchester computer. EDVAC and UNIVAC dominated the news. In March of the same year, Alan Turing was elected to the Royal Society, but then, in January 1952, Turing met a young man named Arnold Murray. Turing was now almost forty, Murray

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this time, Turing had already reported the burglary. His report alerted the police, who, upon uncovering an illegal homosexual relationship between Turing and Murray, arrested Alan Turing under the draconian Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 (Section 11), which stated that “any male person who, in public or private

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1953, Turing engaged in more travel and more work on his theories of brain as machine/machine as brain. And then, on June 8, 1954, Alan Turing was found by his housekeeper, dead of cyanide poisoning in his house in Manchester, a half-eaten apple by his bedside (he customarily ate an

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the computer, he wanted to steer the conversation toward the benefits of reinventing the alphabet (the reader may view this as an eerie evocation of Alan Turing and the purpose of Colossus). He told a Bulgarian newspaper in 1985, “I hear them; I hear the voices and the hearts of the people

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point of view, he might have taken his vacuum-tube idea and used it to invent a computer, but he also might not have met Alan Turing or Max Newman; the computer he invented would not have been Colossus, but on the other hand, he would not have had to invent it

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saw them work. It does not seem likely, therefore, that they would have switched to electronic machines on their own. Tommy Flowers, Max Newman, and Alan Turing knew what electronics could do—it is possible that the computer industry could have blossomed in England rather than the United States, but even aside

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human history and human character. There was no inventor of the computer who was not a vivid personality, and no two are alike. It is Alan Turing who has captured the imagination of the culture, perhaps because of his brilliant mind and his tragic death, but Konrad Zuse is at least as

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attorney has emphasized”: Ibid., p. 128. 15 “Notorious for his idiosyncrasies”: Wansell, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1212910/How-Britain-drove-greatest- genius-Alan-Turing-suicide-just-gay.html. 16 “Before the war”: Hodges, pp. 214–15. 17 “the operation of fifteen U-boats”: Ibid., p. 222. Chapter Six 1

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. 7 “In many ways”: Hodges, p. 438. 8 “transformed his body”: Wansell, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1212910/How-Britain-drove-greatest-genius-Alan-Turing-suicide–just-gay.html. Chapter Ten 1 “became paranoid”: Cox, interview, February 22, 2010. 2 “There may have been similar systems”: Eckert, “A Survey of

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, 2006, pp. 78–85. Ginzburg, Ralph. 100 Years of Lynchings. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1988. Hodges, Andrew. Alan Turing: The Enigma. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983. Leavitt, David. The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006. Macrae, Norman. John von Neumann

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of Logic Based on Ordinals.” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 2, no. 45 (1939): 161–228. Wansell, Geoffrey. “How Britain Drove Its Greatest Genius Alan Turing to Suicide … Just for Being Gay.” Daily Mail, September 12, 2009. Welch, Gregory. “Howard Hathaway Aiken: The Life of a Computer Pioneer.” The Computer Museum

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence

by John Brockman  · 5 Oct 2015  · 481pp  · 125,946 words

fiction and all those movies: Star Maker, Forbidden Planet, Colossus: The Forbin Project, Blade Runner, 2001, Her, The Matrix, “The Borg.” And eighty years after Alan Turing introduced his Universal Machine, it’s time to honor Turing and other AI pioneers by giving them a well-deserved rest. We know the history

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great ideas in human history. The notion that rationality can be accomplished by the physical process of calculation was vindicated in the twentieth century by Alan Turing’s thesis that simple machines can implement any computable function, and by models from D. O. Hebb, Warren McCulloch, and Walter Pitts and their scientific

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give a precise, verifiable definition of what general intelligence or thinking is. The only definition I know that, though limited, can be practically used is Alan Turing’s. With his test, Turing provided an operational definition of a specific form of thinking—human intelligence. Let’s then consider human intelligence as defined

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by Goya of a terrible Colossus who strides across the landscape while the human population flees in terror. Colossus was the name of one of Alan Turing’s first computing machines. Do we have to imagine an existential threat to humanity coming from that computer’s descendants? No, I look on the

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computable functions is countable. Therefore almost all functions are not computable. But try to think of one. Turns out that it takes a genius, an Alan Turing, to come up with an example such as the halting problem. And it takes an exceptional mind, just short of genius, even to understand the

…

WITH THE WORLD’S COMPLEXITY PETER NORVIG Computer scientist; director of research, Google, Inc.; coauthor (with Stuart Russell), Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach In 1950, Alan Turing wisely recognized that the question “Can machines think?” was not helpful and declared, “I shall replace the question with another.” What he did was to

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. So let’s enjoy this new sense of optimism, but let’s not lose sight of how much hard work is left to do. As Alan Turing once said, “We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.” NOTES 1. Seth Lloyd

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Computers, vol. 6, 1965. 7. Kevin Kelly, “The Technium,” Edge, entry February 3, 2014, https://edge.org/conversation/the-technium [accessed July 21, 2015]. 8. Alan Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proc. Lond. Math. Soc. 42, series 2 (1936–7): 230–65. 9. Steven Pinker, comment on

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