Alan Turing

1912-1954 · British · Philosophy of Mind, Computability Theory, Foundations of Artificial Intelligence, Mathematical Logic

A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.

In 1936, a 24-year-old Cambridge fellow set out to settle a dry question in mathematical logic — whether some procedure could decide, for any statement, if it followed from the axioms — and in answering it invented the computer. Alan Turing imagined a machine reading and writing symbols on an infinite tape, step by mechanical step, and showed that this simple device captured everything we intuitively mean by "computation." That is the Turing machine, and the claim that it captures all computation is the Church-Turing thesis. He proved some problems no machine can ever solve — including…

Topics Alan Turing addresses

• the Turing machine
• the Church-Turing thesis
• the Entscheidungsproblem
• the halting problem
• the universal Turing machine
• computable numbers
• the Turing test
• the imitation game
• can machines think?
• the nine objections to machine intelligence
• the theological objection
• the mathematical objection
• the argument from consciousness
• Lady Lovelace's objection
• child machines
• learning by reward and punishment
• B-type unorganized machines
• ordinal logics
• Gödel's incompleteness theorems
• the limits of formal systems
• the stored-program computer
• machines playing chess
• the Chinese Room argument
• functionalism and machine intelligence

Converse with Alan Turing on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Alan Turing's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.