Posts tagged with "Alan Turing"

From the 2015 introduction to the 1965 novel The Tin Men by Michael Frayn: "I hadn't in those days heard of the Turing Test—Alan Turing's proposal that a computer could be said to think if its conversational powers were shown to be indistinguishable from a human being's—so I didn't realise...

…“blockhead” argument… "Blockhead by Paul McCarthy @ Tate Modern" image from flickr user Matt Hobbs. Used by permission. Alan Turing proposed what is the best known criterion for attributing intelligence, the capacity for thinking, to a computer. We call it the Turing Test, and it involves comparing the computer’s verbal...

…the huge ledger… The charming town of Guildford, 40 minutes southwest of London on South West Trains, is associated with two famous British logician-mathematicians. Alan Turing (on whom I seem to perseverate) spent time there after 1927, when his parents purchased a home at 22 Ennismore Avenue just outside the...

…less histrionic… We seem to be at the “Turing moment”, what with Benedict Cumberbatch, erstwhile Sherlock Holmes, now starring as a Hollywood Alan Turing in The Imitation Game. The release culminates a series of Turing-related events over the last few years. The centennial of Turing’s 1912 birth was celebrated actively...

…that's not Turing's Test… “Turing Test” image from xkcd. Used by permission. There has been a flurry of interest in the Turing Test in the last few days, precipitated by a claim that (at last!) a program has passed the Test. The program in question is called "Eugene Goostman" and...

Government zealotry in prosecuting brilliant people is a repeating theme. It gave rise to one of the great intellectual tragedies of the 20th century, the death of Alan Turing after his appalling treatment by the British government. Sadly, we have just been presented with another case. Aaron Swartz committed suicide...

...the Golem... Image of the statue of the Golem of Prague at the entrance to the Jewish Quarter of Prague by flickr user D_P_R. Used by permission (CC-BY 2.0). Alan Turing, the patron saint of computer science, was born 100 years ago this week (June 23). I’ll be attending the...

Image by Whimsical Chris via Flickr Prime Minister Gordon Brown has apologized on behalf of the British government for the appalling treatment of Alan Turing, who was obliged to undergo chemical castration for the crime of being gay. Prime Minister Brown's statement in the Telegraph follows an online petition drive...

A strange social contract has arisen in the scholarly publishing field, a kind of "don't ask, don't tell" approach to online distribution of articles by authors.  Publishers officially forbid online distribution, authors do it anyway without telling the publishers, and publishers don't ask them to stop even though it violates...