Alan Turing

Hugh Alexander , successor to Turing as head of Hut 8, commented that "except for Turing, no-one made a bigger contribution to the success of Hut 8 than Shaun Wylie; he was astonishingly quick and resourceful and contributed to theory and practice in a number of different directions".

Read more: Shaun Wylie | In this article: Shaun Wylie, Mathematics, Bletchley Park, World War II, Cambridgeshire High School for Boys, Hills Road Sixth Form College, and Oxford University Press

"Aeronautical engineering texts," they write, "do not define the goal of their field as 'making machines that fly so exactly like pigeons that they can fool other pigeons.'" Turing, for his part, never intended his test to be used as a practical, day-to-day measure of the intelligence of AI programs; he wanted to provide a clear and understandable example to aid in the discussion of the philosophy of artificial intelligence. As such, it is not surprising that the Turing test has had so little influence on AI research-the philosophy of AI, writes John McCarthy , "is unlikely to have any more effect on the practice of AI research than philosophy of science generally has on the practice of science." Turing predicted that machines would eventually be able to pass the test; in fact, he estimated that by the year 2000, machines with 109 bits (about 119.2 MiB or approximately 120 megabytes) of memory would be able to fool thirty per cent of human judges in a five-minute test. He also predicted that people would then no longer consider the phrase "thinking machine"

Read more: Turing test | In this article: The Turing Test, Loebner prize, Philosophy, Hugh Loebner, John Searle, and Kenneth Colby

An alternate form of (2) -- the machine successively prints all n of the digits on its tape, halting after printing the nth -- emphasizes Minsky's observation: (3) That by use of a Turing machine, a finite definition -- in the form of the machine's TABLE -- is being used to define what is a potentially-"infinite" string of decimal digits.

Read more: Computable number | In this article: Calculus and Kurt Godel

Turing's biographer believed that Turing's use of a typewriter-like model derived from a youthful interest: "Alan had dreamt of inventing typewriters as a boy; Mrs. Turing had a typewriter; and he could well have begun by asking himself what was meant by calling a typewriter 'mechanical'".

Read more: Algorithm | In this article: Stephen C. Kleene, Kurt Godel, George Stibitz, J. Barkley Rosser, Mathematics, Emil Post, and David Hilbert

Professor Jack Good , cryptanalyst working at the time with Turing at Bletchley Park, later said: "Turing's most important contribution, I think, was of part of the design of the bombe, the cryptanalytic machine. He had the idea that you could use, in effect, a theorem in logic which sounds to the untrained ear rather absurd; namely that from a contradiction, you can deduce everything."

Read more: Alan Turing | In this article: Alan Mathison Turing, Bletchley Park, Mathematics, University of Manchester, Cambridge, Suicide, and Second World War

Turing wrote that "the question and answer method seems to be suitable for introducing almost any one of the fields of human endeavor that we wish to include." John Haugeland adds that "understanding the words is not enough; you have to understand the topic as well."

Read more: Turing test | In this article: The Turing Test, Loebner prize, Philosophy, Hugh Loebner, John Searle, and Kenneth Colby

"We can only see a short distance ahead," admitted Alan Turing, in a famous 1950 paper that catalyzed the modern search for machines that think. "But," he added, "we can see much that must be done."

Read more: History of artificial intelligence | In this article: Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Hubert Dreyfus, Herbert Simon, Allen Newell, Darpa, Joseph Weizenbaum, and MIT

In 1950 Alan M. Turing published "Computing machinery and intelligence" in Mind ", in which he proposed that machines could be tested for intelligence using questions and answers.

Read more: Mind | In this article: Human, Psychotherapy, Buddhism, Mental disorder, Baruch Spinoza, Plato, Aristotle, World Health Organization, and Alan M. Turing

He wrote: "we cannot so easily convince ourselves of the absence of complete laws of behaviour ... The only way we know of for finding such laws is scientific observation, and we certainly know of no circumstances under which we could say, 'We have searched enough. There are no such laws.'"

Read more: Philosophy of artificial intelligence | In this article: John Searle, Philosophy, John Lucas, Hubert Dreyfus, Kurt Godel, Thought experiment, and University of Cambridge

Turing wrote "I do not wish to give the impression that I think there is no mystery about consciousness ... ut I do not think these mysteries necessarily need to be solved before we can answer the question of whether machines can thin." Russell and Norvig agree: "Most AI researchers take the weak AI hypothesis for granted, and don't care about the strong AI hypothesis."

Read more: Philosophy of artificial intelligence | In this article: John Searle, Philosophy, John Lucas, Hubert Dreyfus, Kurt Godel, Thought experiment, and University of Cambridge