Alan Turing
In plain wordsA British mathematician who worked out what computers can do in principle, helped break German codes in the Second World War, and proposed the best-known test of machine intelligence.
British mathematician and logician, a founder of computer science and AI. His 1936 paper 'On Computable Numbers' defined the Turing machine, an abstract model of computation, and showed that some problems cannot be settled by any algorithm. In the Second World War he led work at Bletchley Park on breaking the German Enigma cipher. His post-war jobs, designing the Automatic Computing Engine at the National Physical Laboratory and, from 1948, working on the Manchester computers, ran alongside his writing on machine intelligence: the 1948 report 'Intelligent Machinery' sketched trainable networks of simple units, and his 1950 paper in MindComputing Machinery and Intelligence, prop. n.: Alan Turing's 1950 essay asking whether machines can think. It proposed a conversation test in place of that question, answered objections to thinking machines and suggested that machines might learn like children. proposed the imitation game, now called the Turing testTuring test, n.: Alan Turing's proposed test of machine intelligence: a judge holds typed conversations with a hidden person and a hidden computer, and the computer passes if the judge cannot consistently pick it out., answered objections such as the Lovelace objectionLovelace objection, n.: The argument, traced to Ada Lovelace in 1843, that computers cannot be truly creative because they can only do what they have been programmed to do., and suggested building a learning 'child machine'. Convicted in 1952 under the British law that then criminalized sex between men, he died of cyanide poisoning in 1954; a posthumous royal pardon followed in 2013. Computing's highest honor, the Turing AwardTuring Award, prop. n.: Nicknamed the 'Nobel Prize of computing', the top honor in computer science, awarded each year since 1966 by the Association for Computing Machinery. Several AI pioneers have received it., bears his name.
Related
- Turing testTuring test, n.: Alan Turing's proposed test of machine intelligence: a judge holds typed conversations with a hidden person and a hidden computer, and the computer passes if the judge cannot consistently pick it out.
- Computing Machinery and IntelligenceComputing Machinery and Intelligence, prop. n.: Alan Turing's 1950 essay asking whether machines can think. It proposed a conversation test in place of that question, answered objections to thinking machines and suggested that machines might learn like children.
- Lovelace objectionLovelace objection, n.: The argument, traced to Ada Lovelace in 1843, that computers cannot be truly creative because they can only do what they have been programmed to do.
- I. J. GoodI. J. Good, prop. n.: A British statistician who broke codes with Alan Turing and in 1965 argued that a machine smarter than us could design still smarter machines, setting off an 'intelligence explosion'.
- Chinese roomChinese room, n.: A thought experiment: a person who knows no Chinese follows a rulebook to answer Chinese messages so well that outsiders think they understand. If the person doesn't understand, does a computer running a program?
- artificial intelligenceartificial intelligence, n.: Computer systems that do things we would normally credit to a thinking mind, such as holding a conversation, reading an X-ray or planning a route, and the field of research that builds them.
Sources
- Turing, A. M. (1936). On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem. Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society s2-42: 230–265.
- Turing, A. M. (1950). Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind 59(236): 433–460.
Mentioned in
Turing testTuring test, n.: Alan Turing's proposed test of machine intelligence: a judge holds typed conversations with a hidden person and a hidden computer, and the computer passes if the judge cannot consistently pick it out., Ada LovelaceAda Lovelace, prop. n.: A 19th-century English mathematician who published the first program written for a planned mechanical computer, and who argued that such a machine could only do what it was told., Computing Machinery and IntelligenceComputing Machinery and Intelligence, prop. n.: Alan Turing's 1950 essay asking whether machines can think. It proposed a conversation test in place of that question, answered objections to thinking machines and suggested that machines might learn like children., Gödel's incompleteness theoremsGödel's incompleteness theorems, n.: Two famous results from 1931 showing that any consistent set of rules for doing arithmetic leaves some true statements unprovable, and cannot prove that it is itself free of contradictions., I. J. GoodI. J. Good, prop. n.: A British statistician who broke codes with Alan Turing and in 1965 argued that a machine smarter than us could design still smarter machines, setting off an 'intelligence explosion'., John von NeumannJohn von Neumann, prop. n.: A Hungarian-American mathematician who shaped the design of modern computers, co-founded game theory, and is the first person known to have spoken of a coming technological 'singularity'., Turing AwardTuring Award, prop. n.: Nicknamed the 'Nobel Prize of computing', the top honor in computer science, awarded each year since 1966 by the Association for Computing Machinery. Several AI pioneers have received it., Donald MichieDonald Michie, prop. n.: A British codebreaker turned AI pioneer who built a game-playing learning machine out of matchboxes and founded Edinburgh's influential machine-intelligence research group.