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Rolling for aye through Space and Time
It is Alan Turing's hundredth birthday. It has been for some hours now in the country where he was born, but I'm on Eastern Standard Time. I spent much of my week fighting with computers, but I like to think he wouldn't mind being blamed for there being anything there to fight with at all. Google certainly thinks so.
I have been writing about Alan on and off for years—e-mails, online, longer than it took for the poem to find its shape. (Morphogenesis. He was a shape-changer, only partly of his own will.) He ghosts in my dreams and I can lay no claim to him; he was a dead man for longer than his lifetime when I discovered him, first in the person of an actor I loved, slowly emerging into his own tight smile and his schoolboy's dark-parted hair and his voice that everyone agrees was difficult, that I will never hear for myself because neither of his radio talks was recorded: I didn't know him. (You can listen to some who did. "He was not your typical Achilles figure, not a warrior king this man." I can add Odysseus now to the scrim of stories it's hard not to see him through, but if he ever told his way home, it was long after, in another country of electrons and equations, the static spark of a screen.) He became important to me nonetheless. He seems to be important to a great many other people. He should be: and for all the reasons that are worth celebrating as well as the ones that still hurt. At this distance, the apple can't be separated from the cyanide. You take the dead as you find them, bitter and sweet.
And there was another occasion in the executive mess, when Alan was holding forth on the possibilities of a 'thinking machine'. His high-pitched voice already stood out above the general murmur of well-behaved junior executives grooming themselves for promotion within the Bell corporation. Then he was suddenly heard to say: 'No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.' The room was paralysed, while Alan nonchalantly continued to explain how he imagined feeding in facts on prices of commodities and stock, and asking the machine the question 'Do I buy or sell?' All afternoon the phone was ringing in his laboratory, with people asking who on earth it was.
—Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983)
Do something scientific this weekend. Do something transgressive. Enjoy strawberries and cream. Do something really new.
I have been writing about Alan on and off for years—e-mails, online, longer than it took for the poem to find its shape. (Morphogenesis. He was a shape-changer, only partly of his own will.) He ghosts in my dreams and I can lay no claim to him; he was a dead man for longer than his lifetime when I discovered him, first in the person of an actor I loved, slowly emerging into his own tight smile and his schoolboy's dark-parted hair and his voice that everyone agrees was difficult, that I will never hear for myself because neither of his radio talks was recorded: I didn't know him. (You can listen to some who did. "He was not your typical Achilles figure, not a warrior king this man." I can add Odysseus now to the scrim of stories it's hard not to see him through, but if he ever told his way home, it was long after, in another country of electrons and equations, the static spark of a screen.) He became important to me nonetheless. He seems to be important to a great many other people. He should be: and for all the reasons that are worth celebrating as well as the ones that still hurt. At this distance, the apple can't be separated from the cyanide. You take the dead as you find them, bitter and sweet.
And there was another occasion in the executive mess, when Alan was holding forth on the possibilities of a 'thinking machine'. His high-pitched voice already stood out above the general murmur of well-behaved junior executives grooming themselves for promotion within the Bell corporation. Then he was suddenly heard to say: 'No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.' The room was paralysed, while Alan nonchalantly continued to explain how he imagined feeding in facts on prices of commodities and stock, and asking the machine the question 'Do I buy or sell?' All afternoon the phone was ringing in his laboratory, with people asking who on earth it was.
—Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983)
Do something scientific this weekend. Do something transgressive. Enjoy strawberries and cream. Do something really new.
no subject
no subject
Thank you. And I trust you.
I should have guessed Jacobi would play Turing.
I wish I had seen him. I know people who did. There is a television version, but it was made almost ten years later and in any case restructures some of the story.
What a pity these talks weren't recorded!
I know! At least you can read the transcripts: "Can digital computers think?" and "Can automatic calculating machines be said to think?"
The imitation of a machine by a computer requires not only that we should have made the computer, but that we should have programmed it appropriately. The more complicated the machine to be imitated the more complicated must the programme be.
This may be perhaps be made clearer by an analogy. Suppose two men both wanted to write their autobiographies, and that one had had an eventful life, but very little had happened to the other. There would be two difficulties troubling the man with the more eventful life more seriously than the other. He would have to spend more on paper and he would have to take more trouble over thinking what to say. The supply of paper would not be likely to be a serious difficulty, unless for instance he were on a desert island, and in any case it could only be a technical or a financial problem. The other difficulty would be more fundamental and would become more serious still if he were not writing his life but a work on something he knew nothing about, let us say about family life on Mars. Our problem of programming a computer to behave like a brain is something like trying to write this treatise on a desert island. We cannot get the storage capacity we need: in other words we cannot get enough paper to write the treatise on, and in any case we don't know what to write down if we had it. This is a poor state of affairs, but, to continue the analogy, it is something to know how to write, and to appreciate the fact that most knowldge can be embodied in books.