The Turing Test
May 11, 2004 AM/Home
Last semester I took a class in formal language theory. One thing you notice pretty quickly, Alan Turing's name comes up just about every class period all semester long. At some point along the way Alan Turing lodged himself firmly in my own personal pantheon of heros.
So it was kind of nice to wake up this morning and read the buzz on the net that was started by Alan Turing: Thinking Up Computers, an unassuming article in Business Week. Here's a nice "blog" entry keying off that article.
But perhaps the best nugget of all was this link to Alan Turing's seminal 1950 Computing Machinery and Intelligence paper from which "The Turing Test" was first coined. That was the first time I had read one of his papers. Which surprises me, now that I think about it. I wish more of these papers were readily available on the internet.
Along these lines, here's a great quote by Andrew Hodges author of Alan Turing: the Enigma. from his Turing Website:
But it's a pity that the Collected Works are so inaccessible. At over $100 each, libraries cannot afford them. The failure of printed publication to make Turing's oeuvre accessible is an indication of the serious role that the Internet can play in future scholarship.
He's talking about a three volumn set of the collected works of Alan Turing which was recently published, but the idea is the same. Why is it so hard/expensive to find these groundbreaking articles?
