The Turing Guide

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The Turing Guide Edited by Jack Copeland, Jonathan Bowen, Mark Sprevak, and Robin Wilson • A complete guide to one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century • Covers aspects of Turing’s life and the wide range of his intellectual activities • Aimed at a wide readership • This carefully edited resource written by a star-studded list of contributors • Around 100 illustrations This carefully edited resource brings together contributions from some of the world’s leading experts on Alan Turing to create a comprehensive guide that will serve as a useful resource for researchers in the area as well as the increasingly interested general reader. “The Turing Guide is just as its title suggests, a remarkably broad-ranging compendium of Alan Turing’s lifetime contributions. Credible and comprehensive, it is a rewarding exploration of a man, who in his life was appropriately revered and unfairly reviled.” - Vint Cerf, American Internet pioneer JANUARY 2017 | 544 PAGES PAPERBACK | 978-0-19-874783-3 “The Turing Guide provides a superb collection of articles £19.99 | $29.95 written from numerous different perspectives, of the life, HARDBACK | 978-0-19-874782-6 times, profound ideas, and enormous heritage of Alan £75.00 | $115.00 Turing and those around him. We find, here, numerous accounts, both personal and historical, of this great and eccentric man, whose life was both tragic and triumphantly influential.” - Sir Roger Penrose, University of Oxford Ordering Details ONLINE www.oup.com/academic/mathematics BY TELEPHONE +44 (0) 1536 452640 POSTAGE & DELIVERY For more information about postage charges and delivery times visit www.oup.com/academic/help/shipping/. The specifications in this leaflet, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, were as accurate as possible at the time it went to press..

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APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Computers, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Spring
NEWSLETTER | The American Philosophical Association Philosophy and Computers SPRING 2019 VOLUME 18 | NUMBER 2 FEATURED ARTICLE Jack Copeland and Diane Proudfoot Turing’s Mystery Machine ARTICLES Igor Aleksander Systems with “Subjective Feelings”: The Logic of Conscious Machines Magnus Johnsson Conscious Machine Perception Stefan Lorenz Sorgner Transhumanism: The Best Minds of Our Generation Are Needed for Shaping Our Future PHILOSOPHICAL CARTOON Riccardo Manzotti What and Where Are Colors? COMMITTEE NOTES Marcello Guarini Note from the Chair Peter Boltuc Note from the Editor Adam Briggle, Sky Croeser, Shannon Vallor, D. E. Wittkower A New Direction in Supporting Scholarship on Philosophy and Computers: The Journal of Sociotechnical Critique CALL FOR PAPERS VOLUME 18 | NUMBER 2 SPRING 2019 © 2019 BY THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL ASSOCIATION ISSN 2155-9708 APA NEWSLETTER ON Philosophy and Computers PETER BOLTUC, EDITOR VOLUME 18 | NUMBER 2 | SPRING 2019 Polanyi’s? A machine that—although “quite a simple” one— FEATURED ARTICLE thwarted attempts to analyze it? Turing’s Mystery Machine A “SIMPLE MACHINE” Turing again mentioned a simple machine with an Jack Copeland and Diane Proudfoot undiscoverable program in his 1950 article “Computing UNIVERSITY OF CANTERBURY, CHRISTCHURCH, NZ Machinery and Intelligence” (published in Mind). He was arguing against the proposition that “given a discrete- state machine it should certainly be possible to discover ABSTRACT by observation sufficient about it to predict its future This is a detective story. The starting-point is a philosophical behaviour, and this within a reasonable time, say a thousand discussion in 1949, where Alan Turing mentioned a machine years.”3 This “does not seem to be the case,” he said, and whose program, he said, would in practice be “impossible he went on to describe a counterexample: to find.” Turing used his unbreakable machine example to defeat an argument against the possibility of artificial I have set up on the Manchester computer a small intelligence.
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The Enigma Behind the Good–Turing Formula
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Alan Turing's Automatic Computing Engine
5 Turing and the computer B. Jack Copeland and Diane Proudfoot The Turing machine In his first major publication, ‘On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem’ (1936), Turing introduced his abstract Turing machines.1 (Turing referred to these simply as ‘computing machines’— the American logician Alonzo Church dubbed them ‘Turing machines’.2) ‘On Computable Numbers’ pioneered the idea essential to the modern computer—the concept of controlling a computing machine’s operations by means of a program of coded instructions stored in the machine’s memory. This work had a profound influence on the development in the 1940s of the electronic stored-program digital computer—an influence often neglected or denied by historians of the computer. A Turing machine is an abstract conceptual model. It consists of a scanner and a limitless memory-tape. The tape is divided into squares, each of which may be blank or may bear a single symbol (‘0’or‘1’, for example, or some other symbol taken from a finite alphabet). The scanner moves back and forth through the memory, examining one square at a time (the ‘scanned square’). It reads the symbols on the tape and writes further symbols. The tape is both the memory and the vehicle for input and output. The tape may also contain a program of instructions. (Although the tape itself is limitless—Turing’s aim was to show that there are tasks that Turing machines cannot perform, even given unlimited working memory and unlimited time—any input inscribed on the tape must consist of a finite number of symbols.) A Turing machine has a small repertoire of basic operations: move left one square, move right one square, print, and change state.
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Can machines think? The controversy that led to the Turing test, 1946-1950 Bernardo Gonçalves1 Abstract Turing’s much debated test has turned 70 and is still fairly controversial. His 1950 paper is seen as a complex and multi-layered text and key questions remain largely unanswered. Why did Turing choose learning from experience as best approach to achieve machine intelligence? Why did he spend several years working with chess-playing as a task to illustrate and test for machine intelligence only to trade it off for conversational question-answering later in 1950? Why did Turing refer to gender imitation in a test for machine intelligence? In this article I shall address these questions directly by unveiling social, historical and epistemological roots of the so-called Turing test. I will draw attention to a historical fact that has been scarcely observed in the secondary literature so far, namely, that Turing's 1950 test came out of a controversy over the cognitive capabilities of digital computers, most notably with physicist and computer pioneer Douglas Hartree, chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, and neurosurgeon Geoffrey Jefferson. Seen from its historical context, Turing’s 1950 paper can be understood as essentially a reply to a series of challenges posed to him by these thinkers against his view that machines can think. Keywords: Alan Turing, Can machines think?, The imitation game, The Turing test, Mind-machine controversy, History of artificial intelligence. Robin Gandy (1919-1995) was one of Turing’s best friends and his only doctorate student. He received Turing’s mathematical books and papers when Turing died in 1954, and took over from Max Newman in 1963 the task of editing the papers for publication.1 Regarding Turing’s purpose in writing his 1950 paper and sending it for publication, Gandy offered a testimony previously brought forth by Jack Copeland which has not yet been commented about:2 It was intended not so much as a penetrating contribution to philosophy but as propaganda.
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The Essential Turing Reviewed by Andrew Hodges
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