You may find Alan Turing’s computing machinery and
intelligence interesting. Alan was the pivotal scientist behind breaking the
German Enigma codes. Some may argue that he was more important than Churchill
in taking down the Nazi regime. After
the war, instead of reward, he was arrested for a private crime and committed
suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide.
He invented the imitation game designed to try and create a
computer that can think. In the game three people play while the main player tries
to determine who is the man and who is the woman. Both players can lie and make up stories. Player A may be the woman, Player B the man,
and player C the interrogator. Player B can help the interrogator but since all
identifying tones and information have been stripped by relying on written
forms of communication the interrogator has a difficult time determining the
two.
In a second form of the game Player C (interrogator) must
determine who is the computer and who is the human being. If the computer can
fool Player C then it is said that the computer passed the test. The factual
responses of the computer are not important what is important is that it can
fool a human being into thinking it is human.
Turing broke the hypothetical child computer brain down to the
following:
1.) Initial state of the mind (Biology of our brains).
2.) Education it has been subject.
3.) Experiences it has picked up in life.
The tests helped become the 1950’s pioneering work on
artificial intelligence entitled Computing Machinery and Intelligence. The
study helped highlight that computers can mimic human beings and fool people
into believing they are real. At the time, all identifying information was stripped
due to the inherent limitations of technology. Yet it opened up
the possibility of cyber genetics to create a computer that not only thinks but
also is generally indistinguishable from humans (i.e. the movie Terminator).
If you find Alan Turing’s work interesting, you may want to
pick up a book for yourself. It is fairly easy to read and written at a college
level. Since it is from Oxford it has the British style of English. It is a collection of the various leading scientific
discoveries of time and helps to give one a broad overview. If you read the
book you will be more aware of what the root theories are.
Dawkins, R. (2009). The
Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing. Oxford, UK. 978-0-19-921680
