Tag: Alan Turing
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Let’s talk about sex (dolls)
I’m not all that interested in sex dolls, actually. But what I am interested in is the reactions they provoke from people when they consider the nature of intelligence. My view – pretty much that followed by Alan Turing in his pioneering paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” – from which we get the “imitation game” […]
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The opportunities of AI
Embed from Getty Images A computer program – AlphaGo – has now beaten the world’s greatest Go player and another threshold for AI has been passed. As a result a lot of media commentary is focusing on threats – threats to jobs, threats to human security and so on. But what about the opportunities? Actually, […]
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The Imitation Game
The first things to say about this film is that it is well worth seeing, profoundly moving and (in general) very well acted. The second is that it gets to be this way by rather playing with the facts. #520714001 / gettyimages.com I am no Turing expert – I’ve read On Computable Numbers (via the […]
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The intelligent computer has arrived
At least, that is the claim being made by the University of Reading and it seems to have some credibility – as a computer entered into their annual “Turing Test” appears to have passed – convincing a third of the judges that it was a human and not a machine. This definition of intelligence relies […]
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Mixed feelings about the Turing pardon
Alan Turing was not ashamed of being gay and made little or no effort to hide it. In today’s parlance he was “out” – if not to the world then certainly to a large number of people. I wonder if he would ever have asked for a ‘pardon’ – because his view was certainly he […]
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Turing versus Rosenberg
Perhaps this would be better on my book review site, but it’s really a question of science, prompted by reading the challenging The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions. My issue with the book is not atheism but the essential claim of the author – Alex Rosenberg – that human beings cannot reason […]
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Incompleteness in the natural world
A post inspired by Godel, Escher, Bach, Complexity: A Guided Tour, an article in this week’s New Scientist about the clash between general relativity and quantum mechanics and personal humiliation. The everyday incompleteness: This is the personal humiliation bit. For the first time ever I went on a “Parkrun” today – the 5km Finsbury Park […]
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A (partial) answer to my Goedelian conundrum?
Last week I puzzled over what seemed to me to be the hand waiving dismissal, by both Alan Turing and Douglas Hofstadter of what I saw as the problem of humans being able to write true statements that the formal systems employed by computers could not determine – the problem thrown up by Goedel’s Incompleteness […]
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Cambridge University and computer science
Cambridge University has a stellar reputation for Computer Science in the UK. The Computer Laboratory can trace its history back over more than 75 years (to a time when ‘computers’ where humans making calculations), while the wider University can claim Alan Turing for one of its own. And Sinclair Research, ARM, the Cambridge Ring – […]
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Turing, Hofstadter, Bach – with some Cherla thrown in
A few weeks ago I attended the morning (I had to go back to work in the afternoon) of the BCS doctoral consortium in Covent Garden in London – watching various PhD students present their work to audience of peers. The presentation which most interested me was that of Srikanth Cherla who is researching connectionist […]
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 