Why the Turing Test Is a Flawed Benchmark

By Terry Walby, Wired UK

This is a guest post by Terry Walby, UK managing director at IT service company IPsoft

June 23 marks a century since Alan Turing’s birth and it’s fair to say that in that time he has inspired many by his theories and work, none more so than the founders of our IT service company, IPsoft. Turing was undoubtedly a thinker ahead of his time — a brilliant mathematician and an architect of much of the computing theory on which today’s world relies.

Wired U.K.
The annual Loebner competition, where participants attempt to show that a machine can pass for a human in conversation, is based on Turing’s theory that such a test would be an adequate demonstration of intelligence. The theory was that a machine would be shown to be intelligent if it could emulate a human in this way.

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How to Pass the Turing Artificial Intelligence Test

By Duncan Geere, Wired UK

Are you human or a machine? Prove it, by passing the Turing Test — a test of the ability of a machine to exhibit intelligent behavior.

Wired U.K.
In Alan Turing’s 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, the mathematician posed the question: “Can machines think?” But almost immediately he dismissed that question as too “meaningless” to be worthy of discussion, and swapped it for the much-more specific: “Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?”

Turing’s original “imitation game” had nothing to do with artificial intelligence. It was a simple party game with three players — a man, a woman, and a judge of either sex. The judge sits in a room apart from the man and woman, and has to guess which is which from nothing but written communication.

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DarwinTunes ‘Evolves’ Music From Noise

By Elizabeth Norton, ScienceNOW

From Mozart to the Beatles, music evolves as listeners get used to sounds they initially find strange or even shocking. As trailblazing music becomes mainstream, artists strike out in new directions. But in a new study, a computer program shows how listeners drive music to evolve in a certain way. Although the resulting strains are hardly Don Giovanni, the finding shows how users’ tastes exert their own kind of natural selection, nudging tunes to evolve out of noise.

Bioinformaticist Robert MacCallum of Imperial College London was working with a program called DarwinTunes, which he and his colleagues had developed to study the musical equivalent of evolution in the natural world. The program produces 8-second sequences of randomly generated sounds, or loops, from a database of digital “genes.” In a process akin to sexual reproduction, the loops swap bits of code to create offspring. “Genetic” mutations crop up as new material is inserted at random. The “daughter” loops retain some of the pitch, tone quality, and rhythm of their parents, but with their own unique material added.

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AbyssBox Displays Deep-Sea Animals Under Pressure

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AbyssBox
  • AbyssBox
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  • Lens with 3 Air France Planes

Unless you're James Cameron, you've probably never seen a Mirocaris fortunate—a shrimp that lives in the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean. Or a little white crab named Segonzacia mesatlantica. That's because these deep-sea species can't survive in a standard aquarium—normal atmospheric pressure will kill them. Luckily, one of Europe's largest aquariums, Océanopolis, in Brest, France, has developed a solution: a unique high-pressure viewing cabinet called the AbyssBox (above). Visitors can now stare into the 4.25-gallon display and see the kinds of deep-dwelling sea fauna you used to have to spend a Titanic-sized budget to glimpse. Click through the photo gallery above to learn how it works.

Photo: Vincent Fournier


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Alan Turing’s Extraordinary, Tragically Short Life: A Timeline

Image: Bernt Rostad/Flickr

By Olivia Solon, Wired UK

In Alan Turing‘s 42 years of life, his discoveries and inventions saved thousands of lives and paved the way for modern computing. Despite this, it has been only recently that he has been recognised for his achievements.

Wired U.K.
Turing was eccentric to say the least, with a scruffy appearance and stammering speech. Turing’s mother would have to write to him to remind him to buy “at least one suit a year”. This did not stop him from holding up his trousers with string and wearing a pyjama top under his coat. In Hut 8, where he conducted most of his codebreaking at Bletchley, Turing would attach his tea mug to the radiator using a combination lock. During hay fever season, it wasn’t uncommon to see Turing ride his bicycle to work wearing his government-issued gas mask.

Beyond his eccentricities, Turing was a brilliant academic and he was credited by Winston Churchill as having made the single biggest contribution to Allied victory in the war against Nazi Germany. Wired.co.uk has created a simple timeline of his achievements.

23 June 1912: Alan Mathison Turing was born in London

1926: Aged 14, he was sent to Sherborne School in Dorset. His first day of term coincided with the 1926 General Strike. Turing was so determined not to miss his first day of school that he cycled the 97km from his home in Southampton. His teachers worried that he leaned too heavily towards maths and science, at the expense of the classics. The headmaster wrote to his parents: “If he is to be solely a scientific specialist, he is wasting his time at a public school”.

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