Thinker · TH-0033
Alan Turing
Alan Turing was an English mathematician and logician whose 1936 paper defined computation through an abstract machine and showed the limits of what can…
Also known as Alan Mathison Turing
1912 – 1954 · London, Cambridge, Princeton, Bletchley Park, Manchester
Traditions: Analytic
Alan Turing was an English mathematician and logician whose 1936 paper defined computation through an abstract machine and showed the limits of what can be mechanically decided. He worked on codebreaking at Bletchley Park during the Second World War and later on early computers at Manchester. In 1950 he proposed the imitation game, reframing the question whether machines can think as a question about whether a machine's conversational behaviour can be told apart from a human's.
Key ideas
- Any effectively calculable procedure can be carried out by a simple abstract machine, now called a Turing machine.
- Some well-defined problems, such as the halting problem, cannot be solved by any such machine.
- The question 'Can machines think?' is best replaced by a test of indistinguishable conversational performance.
- Many objections to machine intelligence can be answered by examining them one by one.
Major works
- "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" (1936)
- "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (Mind, 1950)
In the conversation
- Question Turing never said passing his test means a machine thinks? Then what was the test for?
- Reading group Reading group: Searle’s “Minds, Brains, and Programs” with the replies, over three weeks