Reflections of Alan Turing by Dermot Turing

Author:Dermot Turing
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press

Cybermen (which may be robots, but are probably actors) from the 2014 Doctor Who series. (Adrian Rogers / BBC / Everett Collection / Alamy)

The Robot Fallacy has evolved subtly since 1948. I am often privileged to be asked to attend and sometimes to speak at gatherings where artificial intelligence is on the agenda, since the begetter of the whole business, Alan Turing, is usually present in spirit (and on the agenda himself) at these events. Frequently, someone in the audience will ask about the dangers of super-intelligent machinery – a subject which deserves proper study – but almost invariably the experts giving the lectures will say something along the lines of, ‘I think you watch too many science fiction movies; robots aren’t about to take over the world.’ With that cheap laugh we can move on and avoid a difficult discussion about controls and limitations in a rapidly growing area of research. If it happens to you – don’t stand for it, complain that you didn’t mention robots, and demand a proper answer to your question.

Back in 1948, Alan Turing’s paper, called ‘Intelligent Machinery’, was spiked. The NPL is now rather proud of it, but it was not until 1968, fourteen years after Alan’s death, that it was first published.8 Alan Turing wanted to be heard on the subject of machines and intelligence, but nobody wanted to listen. Alan was bored and frustrated, but his old teacher and mentor came to the rescue. The sabbatical year was spent at Cambridge, where Alan bumped into M.H.A. Newman, who had first put the idea of machine processes for algorithms into his head back in 1935, and now Newman suggested that Alan might come to work in Newman’s new ‘Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory’ in Manchester. Alan jumped at the idea, and jumped ship. The rest of his life was spent in Manchester.

Newman’s Manchester computer was ‘actually working 8/7/48’ – Alan put this little dig at NPL’s interminable delay into his ‘Intelligent Machinery’ paper – and ran its first routine on 21 June 1948. In fact, the machine was only a ‘baby’ – a proof-of-cncept device, rather like the Pilot model of the ACE which Alan Turing disparaged as a distraction from the full-size ACE which might never get built. But another, bigger Manchester machine was coming into being, and when that came into service later that year there was another round of fun in the newspapers.

The story is quite well known. Computers were for sums, even old sums: so the Manchester computer had been put through its paces on an old, unsolved problem dating from the 1600s. This was to find which numbers of the form 2n–1 are prime. Doing the calculations by hand was immensely tedious and probably pointless. But in binary, numbers like this all look like 111111… and are eminently suitable for testing on a computer with minimal memory capacity. (It was Newman’s idea to choose this problem – itself a brilliant mathematical insight.) Not only did the program

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