Computers:
After the war was over, Turing decided to go to the National Physics Laboratory (NPL). Like his idea all along, he wanted to make a machine that made choices like humans do. He called it "machine intelligence". The first idea he came up with was a chess playing machine that was called the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE). He used to like to play chess as a kid and thought it was an interesting game. He started to like to focus on game theory and made a strategy for the computer to follow. The strategy was called minimax. Minimax's strategy was not to make the most beneficial move for itself, but to make the least beneficial move for the opponent. The machine would have a great advantage because it would be able to think many steps farther ahead than the person it was playing. If ACE was successful, it would be able to solve any problem with the right programming. He named the process of writing programs "instruction tables". ACE kept having many delays which Turing did not like. He was always used to getting everything he wanted when he needed it. The cryptographers were given the money whenever they asked for it because it would help the war, but now, he couldn't get the money he wanted as fast as he wanted because it was not needed to be done. In 1946, while still working on his ideas, he got back into long distance running. He started to compete in running events and was usually among the top placers. In a marathon he ran in, he got a time of two hours and 46 minutes. That is an average of a six and a half minute mile average. Turing wrote a paper called "Intelligent Machinery" about everything that he learned about artificial intelligence. It also went on about how an infants mind is like a machine's. Also in the writing, it had information about a concept he called "imitation game", which was about whether or not computers had intelligence or not. Unfortunately, the paper was never able to be published because the NPL administrators were unimpressed with the work. Turing then gave up on that writing and didn't bother with it. He then began to work on another writing that he wrote called "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". That writing mainly focused on a topic he touched on in the other writing. This writing was all about the "imitation game". The Turing Test (imitation game) as people called it, would see if a human would be able to tell the difference between a computer answering a question and a human answering the same question. That would make the computer artificially intelligent, but there has been no computer to pass the test. At NPL, administrators thought that Turing was arrogant and troublesome because he was always talking about mathematical advances that weren't possible at the time. They thought he was not realistic, so Turing was sent on a year sabbatical. Turing then went back to King's College and started to do research on the brain. |
"I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted." -Alan Turing |