Alan Turing

mathematician · 7 mentions across 5 readings

In this course

Turing is foundational to the course's preoccupation with computation and machine intelligence—his formalization of the algorithm and the Turing machine establish the theoretical bedrock for thinking about what machines can do and, implicitly, what they cannot. The course readings invoke his conceptual apparatus to probe whether contemporary AI genuinely instantiates substrate-independent computation or whether functionalist accounts of machine cognition rely on unstated philosophical assumptions that collapse under scrutiny. His work haunts the seminar's central question: if Turing machines can execute any computable function, what gap remains between computation and thought, between algorithm and meaning?

Background

Alan Mathison Turing was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. He was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science.

Wikipedia →

Mentioned in 5 readings

Notes on Thinking Machine Imaginaries_ Llull

Leibniz, and Lovelace to 'Shoggoth with a Smiley Face'

sequence of instructions—that is, an algorithm” (Misa, below), the invention of the software loop and the nested loop (now called recursion, a process fundamental to contemporary artificial intelligence), while Note A suggested that machine…In The Babbage Machine and the Origins of Programming, the authors reproduce Lovelace’s table for the Bernoulli numbers and translate the algorithm into a 65-FORTRAN program that compute them. The program has eight “if . . . [then] go-to” s…To counter the Lovelace’s objection, Turing creates a test for intelligence, or, more specifically, for the appearance of intelligence in machines, predicated on whether a machine can exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that…

Isabel Millar

People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.

Ada Lovelace 3 Charles Babbage 2 Donato Ricci 1 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 1 H. P. Lovecraft 1 Valentin Goujon 1 Immanuel Kant 1 Jacques-Alain Miller 1 Jacques Lacan 1 Thomas J. Misa 1 Douglas Hartree 1 Jacob Bernoulli 1 Alonzo Church 1 Brian Cantwell Smith 1 John Searle 1 Kurt Gödel 1 Steve Omohundro 1

Alan Turing

Leibniz, and Lovelace to 'Shoggoth with a Smiley Face'

from The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence

ARE YOU LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?

or the Eschatology of Machines - Journal #137

The Gig Economy