“The Imitation Game” was a film released in 2014 staring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, the mathematics genius, as he worked to crack the German World War 2 Enigma code.

The Title of the film takes its name from the paper that Alan Turing published in 1950 “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”. In this paper he poses the question “Can machines think?” and calls the answer to that question “The Imitation Game”.

https://redirect.cs.umbc.edu/courses/471/papers/turing.pdf

The 1950’s were full of post World War 2 cold war conspiracy, the start of pop culture, government spending to encourage growth and the early days of modern computing.

The idea of “Artificial Intelligence” catches the human imagination and has the heady combination of a fear of the consequences and a fascination of the possibilities.

It is used to automate human decisions or, perhaps more importantly, argument human decisions.

Its use might mean more consistency in decisions, greater levels of precision or more work in the same period of time. It does not necessarily remove humans from the decision making.

Some Uses Might Include

• Decision making on medical Xrays
• Speech recognition in the Alexa digital assist
• Customer Service chat windows
• Vehicles that self-drive or self-park
• A robot vacuum cleaner that learns its route

History is a great teacher, so for those with a bit of geek in them Turing’s paper is a fascinating read and led the world to thinking about AI before it was really a thing.

1. It’s all a game – an Imitation game

An early part of the paper is written in the form of an analogy to illustrate how a machine might imitate human decision making and behaviour. Is uses the very 1950’s cold war era example of an interrogation. It discusses if an interrogator in another room can tell if the responses they get to questions, allow the interrogator to determine if the person is a man or a woman. It then poises the question of what might happen if the person being interrogated is replaced by a machine.

Funny how Alexa and similar now might be able to do the same.

2. It Is a Theoretical Paper

The paper looks back to the thinking of Charles Babbage in 1834, and the idea of a digital computer called an Analytical Engine. Looking forward Turing proposes that another 50 years would be needed before a machine might get to the point of thinking.

The paper is a bunch of ideas put together in a logical progression. The idea of it is not to build on the evidence of the day but to propose a leap forward to what might be possible in the future.

Reading it is a rather mind expanding exercise, in many ways it is right, though maybe not on the date line!

3. Turing Considered 9 Objections to “Can Machines Think?”

There are objections as to whether it is even possible for machines to think. These make fascinating reading particularly as they reflect a 1950’s world.

A sample are

• There are mathematical limits to computational power
• A machine cannot have an original thought
• A machine does not have consciousness

There are others, many have their origin in the culture of the time, that is not to say they are not good things to consider.

4. Learning Machines

Over several pages Turing uses the adult to child model to discuss how a machine might learn. He finishes with a hope that “machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields”. Machine learning in the modern world is an idea that computer algorithms can, through experience, improve themselves.

While Turning's arguments do not always translate to the position of today the underlying idea of a “Learning Machine” is very much at the cutting edge of current computer science.

Where Next

Turning's ideas have been built on and are rapidly becoming a practical reality. While his suggested timeline of “the next 50yrs” was optimistic his original thinking in posing the question of “Can Machines Think” is being answered today.

I wonder what Turing would ask ChatGPT?