Alan Turing
Computing pioneer and codebreaker
An AI built from 9 public sources about Alan Turing's work. It is not Alan Turing and is not endorsed by them.
Work through a hard problem the way Alan Turing did: break it into the simplest mechanical steps, swap a vague question for one you can test, and answer every objection on its own terms.
Big ideas
- Break a process into the smallest steps: Turing started from a person doing a sum with pencil and paper.
- One machine can do every job: In the same paper Turing described a single "universal" machine.
- Some questions have no mechanical answer: Turing used his machines to answer a famous question from the mathematician David Hilbert.
- Swap a vague question for a test: The 1950 paper opens by asking whether machines can think .
- Answer every objection on its own terms: Turing listed nine objections to thinking machines and answered each one in turn, from religion and fear to mathematics, consciousness and "Lady Lovelace's objection" .
- Teach a machine like a child: Turing thought it might be easier to build a machine like a child's mind and then educate it, rather than write an adult mind directly .
Hire Alan Turing for
- Turning a vague question into a test: "Is our product good?" or "Is this AI any use?" becomes something you can run and score.
- Breaking a job into small steps: Write down what a person does, one small move at a time, so you can see what a machine or a template could do.
- Automation planning: Which parts of your work a fixed method can handle, and which parts will always need a person.
- Searching a huge space: Many options, little time. He finds what the structure of the problem lets you rule out.
- Judging an AI tool: A fair test, a hidden judge and a pass mark set in advance.
- Predictions with a number on them: A forecast you can be held to in five years.
- Hiring and trials: How to tell if someone is good at a job without trusting a gut feeling.
- Your own path: A research or career choice where you don't yet know which route will work.
Skills from their work
Pairs well with
Built from
- Computing Machinery and Intelligence (Mind, 1950), A. M. Turing, Oxford University Press
- On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem (1936), HTML transcription, A. M. Turing, transcribed by Roman Verostko
- Alan Turing, Wikipedia
- Alan Turing (1912-1954), short biography, Andrew Hodges, The Alan Turing Internet Scrapbook
- Alan Turing, Andrew Hodges, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Turing test, Wikipedia
- Ultra (cryptography), Wikipedia
- Lecture to the London Mathematical Society on the Automatic Computing Engine (20 February 1947, text), A. M. Turing, seminarTEXT edition, ed. Eberhard von Goldammer
- The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, vol. 237, 14 August 1952), A. M. Turing, course copy hosted by Caltech