Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem

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pages: 210 words: 62,771

Turing's Vision: The Birth of Computer Science by Chris Bernhardt

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Conway's Game of Life, discrete time, Douglas Hofstadter, Georg Cantor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John Conway, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture

The answer is that he wrote a remarkable paper in 1936, when he was just twenty four years old. This paper is Turing’s most important intellectual contribution. However, this paper and its groundbreaking ideas are not widely known. This book is about that paper. The paper has the rather uninviting title, On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem. But don’t be discouraged by the title, because it contains a wealth of elegant and powerful results. It also contains some remarkably beautiful proofs. Turing wants to show that a leading mathematician’s view of mathematics is wrong. To do this he needs to study computation: What exactly is computation?

This idea is then extended to Turing machines: there are some Turing machines that accept their encodings and some that do not, but there is no Turing machine that can distinguish these two classes. This, in turn, leads to the the proofs that certain decision problems are undecidable. In particular, we prove that the halting problem and the acceptance problem are both undecidable. Chapter 8 The title of Turing’s paper is On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem. The connection to the Entscheidungsproblem has now been explained, but computable numbers have not. In this chapter we explain what these numbers are and the basic result concerning them. The chapter starts with Cantor’s idea of cardinality. We look at some basic, but surprising facts, about infinite cardinal numbers.

The only conclusion is that the list of computable numbers is not something that can be constructed by a computer. If the list could be constructed by a computer, then b would be computable and we would have a contradiction. If it is not possible to construct the list by a computer, then there is no contradiction, so that must be the case. The title of Turing’s paper is “On Computable Numbers, with An application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” This title should now make sense. Turing wanted to show that Hilbert’s view of the Entscheidungsproblem was not correct. To recap: He first needed to give a definition of an effective procedure, or algorithm. This he did through his definition of what we now call Turing machines.


Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Abraham Wald, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, dark matter, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, Ford Model T, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, IFF: identification friend or foe, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, SETI@home, social graph, speech recognition, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture

Even in a perfectly deterministic universe, there is no consistent method to predict the ending in advance. To an observer in our universe, the digital universe appears to be speeding up. To an observer in the digital universe, our universe appears to be slowing down. Universal codes and universal machines, introduced by Alan Turing in his “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” of 1936, have prospered to such an extent that Turing’s underlying interest in the “decision problem” is easily overlooked. In answering the Entscheidungsproblem, Turing proved that there is no systematic way to tell, by looking at a code, what that code will do.

“There is mighty little room for putting things in one’s cabin, but nothing else that worries me,” he reported to his mother on September 28. “The mass of canaille with which one is herded can easily be ignored.”2 Turing’s arrival in Princeton was followed, five days later, by the proofs of his “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” These thirty-five pages would lead the way from logic to machines. Alan Mathison Turing was born at Warrington Lodge, London, on June 23, 1912, to Julius Mathison Turing, who worked for the Indian Civil Service, and Ethel Sara Turing (née Stoney), whose family included George Johnstone Stoney, who named the electron, in advance of its 1894 discovery, in 1874.

After a full year of work, Turing gave Newman a draft of his paper in April of 1936. “Max’s first sight of Alan’s masterpiece must have been a breathtaking experience, and from this day forth Alan became one of Max’s principle protégés,” says William Newman, Max’s son. Max Newman lobbied for the publication of “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, and arranged for Turing to go to Princeton to work with Alonzo Church. “This makes it all the more important that he should come into contact as soon as possible with the leading workers on this line, so that he should not develop into a confirmed solitary,” Newman wrote to Church.15 Turing arrived in Princeton carrying his sextant, and stretching his resources to survive on his King’s College fellowship (of £300) for the year.


pages: 476 words: 121,460

The Man From the Future: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Benoit Mandelbrot, business cycle, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, cloud computing, Conway's Game of Life, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DeepMind, deferred acceptance, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Georg Cantor, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jean Tirole, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, P = NP, Paul Samuelson, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, second-price auction, side project, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological singularity, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

The pair almost certainly met in person for the first time. They would renew their acquaintance in September the following year, when Turing arrived in Princeton as a visiting fellow. He had asked von Neumann to write him a letter of recommendation. Five days later, working in an office in Fine Hall, Turing received the proofs for ‘On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem’, the paper that laid the theoretical foundations of modern computer science.7 He was disappointed by its reception in Princeton. But one person did notice it. ‘Turing’s office was right near von Neumann’s, and von Neumann was very interested in that kind of thing,’ says Herman Goldstine, who would work closely with von Neumann on computers.

Zund, ‘George David Birkhoff and John von Neumann: A Question of Priority and the Ergodic Theorems, 1931–1932’, Historia Mathematica, 29 (2002), pp. 138–56. 6. Garrett Birkhoff, 1958, ‘Von Neumann and Lattice Theory’, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 64 (1958), pp. 50–56. 7. Alan Turing, ‘On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem’, published in two parts 1936–7, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 42(1) (1937), pp. 230–65. 8. Interview with Herman Goldstine conducted by Nancy Stern, 1980, https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107333/oh018hhg.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. 9.

C. 214 McNamara, Robert 222 Macrae, Norman 103 Manchester, University of 138, 142, 269 Mandelbrot, Benoît 277–8, 282 Manhattan Project xii–xiii, 80–96, 85 assembly of the first implosion device 87–8 cost 80 decision to use bomb 93 detonator 86–7 and ENIAC 109 Explosive Division 86 explosive lenses 84, 85, 86–7 Fat Man 89, 92 Fat Man dropped 95–6 Feynman recruited 82 Groves appointed to lead 80–1 gun projects 81–2, 83 implosion bomb design 82, 83–4, 85, 85–8 initiator 87–8, 90, 91 Jumbo 88–9 Little Boy 82, 865, 88, 92 Little Boy dropped 94–5, 96 location 81 the Martians 1, 9 Oppenheimer appointed to head laboratory 81 origins 80 personnel 80 secrecy lifted 132–3 small-scale test 88 Soviet spies in 92 tamper 87, 91 Target Committee 94 testing approach 84 Theoretical Physics Division 99 Thin Man 82, 85 Trinity test 92, 209 VN joins 82–4 VNs first contribution 83 VNs visits to Los Alamos 84–5, 85 VNs work 82–8 MANIAC I 137, 139 Many Worlds interpretation, the 57–8 Margolus, Norman 245 Mars, terraforming 264 Marxism 14 Mathematical Association of America 77 Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (von NeumanNeumann) 41, 43–9, 50, 62 mathematics xii axiomatic method 16, 19–20, 24, 144, 199 consistency unprovable 116–17 debate on the limits of 16, 22 Euclid’s parallel postulate 17–18, 17 foundational crisis 15–25, 111–113, 113–115 Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem 112–167 Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem 116–7 hyperbolic geometry 18, 18 not complete 112–13 set theory 20–5, 26–8, 157 type theory 26–7 VNs contributions to the foundational crisis 22–5 matrix algebra 32 matrix mechanics 30–33, 32, 35, 36–38, 39, 46 Matsumoto, Shigeko 95–6 Mauchly, John W. 106–8, 123, 130, 308–9n53 EDVAC patent dispute 125–6, 127–8 The Use of High Speed Vacuum Tubes for Calculating 108 MAUD report, the 80, 301n23 Maxwell, James Clerk 33 Mayer, Maria Goeppert 137 Maynard Smith, John 180 measurement problem, quantum mechanics 43–5, 57–8, 59, 296n43 Meitner, Lise 78, 301n23 Merkle, Ralph 264 Mermin, David 46, 50, 54 Metropolis, Nicholas 109, 135–6, 136, 137, 139 Michigan, University of 105, 181, 258 Logic of Computers Group 243–4, 258, 265 Milgrom, Paul 177–8 military worth 188, 189, 191 minimax theorem proof 143–8, 154, 169, 176–7, 192 Minority Report (film) 231 Minsky, Marvin 274, 276 Minta/Model gimnázium 7–8, 9 Mises, Ludwig von 152–3 Misner, Charles 57 MIT 107, 128, 130, 175, 185, 242, 244–5, 274 Modernism 154–165, 291n12 molecular biology 62, 230, 268 Mondrian, Piet 154 Monte Carlo 74–5 Monte Carlo bomb simulations 133–8 Moon, colonization of 225–6, 264–8, 268 Moore, Edward F. 263 Moore, Gordon 140 Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania 101, 1054–11, 106, 122, 126, 128, 308106 Moore’s law 140 Morgenstern, Oskar xiii, 152–9, 175, 199 contribution to Theory of Games 158–9, 160–1, 165–6169, 171, 173 disillusionment with economics 153–4, 157, 158–9 doctoral thesis 153–4 education 152–3 habilitation thesis 153–4 joins Princeton 155–6 leaves Austria 154–5 marriage 156 travels 153 and VN 154, 155, 156–9 Moskito Island 244, 245, 245–6 multi-player (n-person) games 169–75, 176 multi-player games 169, 176 Munich Agreement 76 Murdoch, Iris 145 Musil, Robert 32 Nagasaki, bombing of 95–6 nanotechnology 268–9 NASA, Santa Clara workshop 264, 265 Nasar, Sylvia 198, 202 Nash, John 151, 177–8, 179, 197–203, 200, 203, 204, 207–8 A Beautiful Mind characterization 198 ‘The Bargaining Problem’ 199, 204 character 198–9 conception of game theory 203 contribution to game theory 199–203 and Einstein 199–200 non-cooperative Pair experiment 207–8 racism 198 relationship with RAND 202 and Shapley 197–8 VNs rejection 199–203 Nash equilibria 201–3 National Academy of Sciences 84 National Cash Register Accounting Machine 79 National Defence Research Committee 77, 79 National Socialism 5 natural selection 180–1, 253–4, 257 nature, randomness in 248, 249 Naturwissenschaften (journal) 52 Nautical Almanac Office, Bath 79 Nazi Germany 93, 78, 203 annexation of Austria 117, 154–5 annexation of the Sudetenland 76 atom bomb project 96–7 decline of science in 63–4 Hitler appointed Chancellor 62–3 resistance movement 51 totalitarian dictatorship 63 Neddermeyer, Seth 82, 83–4 neoliberalism 152 Neumann, John von xi–xiv, 66, 71 ‘A Model of General Economic Equilibrium’ 151 acquaintance with Turing 70, 103 appearance 71–2 applies for commission 73–4 appointed to AEC 212 appointed to BRL’s scientific advisory board 77 approach to giving seminars 41 approach to ordinals 23–4, 24 approach to programming 134–5 arrival in America 50, 65–7 background 1–3 and Barricelli 2547 becomes American citizen 72 begins working for IBM 126 Berlin years 39–41, 40 birth xii, 1 birth of daughter 71 and brain structure 227–8 burial 280 cancer 224, 279–80 cancer diagnosis 274–5 cars 665–76, 283 character 14, 77, 210–11, 281–3 chemical engineering degree 28 chemical engineering studies 25–6 child custody arrangements 141–2 childhood mathematical ability 3–4, 289n6 The Computer and the Brain 275–6 contribution to computing 122–7, 129–130, 131, 139–140, 308n48 contributions to the foundational crisis 165, 22–5, 24, 26–7 contributions to quantum theory 30, 36, 37–9, 41, 43–6, 48–9, 50, 54, 60–1, 61 conversion to Catholicism 7 cynical side 281–2 death xiv, 280 and decision to use bomb 93 defence of Oppenheimer 211–12 Defense in Atomic War 221 divorce from Mariette 75 doctoral exam 28 doctoral thesis 26–8 driving skill, lack of 665–76 economic model 148–9, 151–2 education 3, 4–5, 7–10, 11–13, 14 EDVAC report 121–7 EDVAC patent dispute 125–6, 127–8 and ENIAC 105–6, 109–111, existential threats speculations 283–4 explosives and ballistics work 77, 83 fame 105 family background 2 fascination with war strategy 191–2 first marriage 50, 65 First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC 111, 121–7 first paper 12–13 Fuchs-von Neumann patent 99–100, 109 and Gödel 111, 113, 116–18 graduates from high school 25 health deteriorates 235 and Hilbert 27–8 home life 72, 77 hospitalization 276–7 IAS computer project 127, 128–30, 138–9, 193 and ICBM threat 216, 217–18 implosion bomb design 84, 85, 865–8 impossibility proof 48–9, 50–4 interest in the biological sciences 226–7 interests in computing 79–80, 103–45 invited to Princeton 49–50 joins Manhattan Project 82–4 joins navy 79 and Klára’s return to Hungary 76–7 language skill 3 last book 275 last days 277–80 leaves IAS 277 life in Budapest xi, 1–9, 5, 7, 14 Manhattan Project work 82–8, 85 Marina’s marriage 278–9 Mariette leaves 66, 67, 72 marries Klára 76 Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics 41, 43–9, 50, 62 mathematical powers 147 and the measurement problem 43–5, 57–8, 296n43 Medal of Freedom 277, 277 Medal for Merit 83 meets Klára 74–5 and Morgenstern 154, 155, 156–9 minimax theorem proof 143–8, 169, 176–7, 192 misanthropy 203 Monte Carlo bomb simulations 133–8 and Nash 199–203 nervous energy 77 on nuclear deterrence 221 obsessions in, 1948 192 obsessive-compulsive disorder 77 ‘On Certain Equations of Economics and a Generalization of Brouwer’s Fixed-Point Theorem’ 148 open-mindedness about quantum mechanics 59–60 operator theory 61–2 opposition to Marxism 14 and origin of atom bomb 78 parties 76 plans to leave IAS 277–8 on power of the atom 102 powers 147 premonitions of war 70–1 at Princeton 65–72, 676, 76 Princeton contract extended 63 proof of the ergodic hypothesis 69 reaction to Bohm 54 relationship with Klára 77, 97 resolves Russell’s paradox 26–8 return to Catholicism 279, 280 road trip with Marina 97–8, 98 Rockefeller Foundation grant 29, 39 salary 65–6, 68 self-reproducing automata 229–30, 232–7, 233, 236 siblings 2, 290n13 Silliman Memorial Lectures 274, 275 talents spotted 11 target votes 94 theory of automata 228–32 Theory of Self-reproducing Automata 226, 231, 236, 237 Trinity test 91–2 Turing’s influence 121–2, 301n22 unification of quantum mechanics 30, 36, 37–9, 43–9 unique gift 12–13 on universal Turing machine 120 at University of Budapest 11–13 at University of Berlin 12, 39–41 view of the Cold War 208–9 vision of future technical possibilities 102–3 visits Europe, 1949 203 visits to Los Alamos 84–5, 85 war work 78–80 work for RAND 190–1, 192–4, 195–6 wartime visit to Britain 79–80 Neumann, Klára Dán von 74, 235 on computers 121 death 280 death of father 77 depression 77, 1387 ENIAC work 132–3, 135–8 family background 75 IAS computer project 129 insecurity 132 marriage to Eckart 280 marries VN 76 meets VN 74–5 Monte Carlo bomb simulations 133–8 parties 76 relationship with VN 77, 97 return to BRL 136 return to Hungary 76–7 second marriage and divorce 75–6 and Theory of Games 158 and VNs last days 278 and VNs vision of future technical possibilities 102–3 Neumann, Lili von 14 Neumann, Margaret von 2 Neumann, Mariette Kövesi von 66, 67, 300n2 arrival in America 50, 65–7 child custody arrangements 141 divorce 75 marriage to VN 50, 65 university studies 65 leaves VN 66, 72 Neumann, Marina, von birth 71 custody arrangements 141–2 on home life 72 marriage 278–9 road trip with VN 97–8, 98 on VNs marriage to Klára 76 and VNs return to Catholicism 279 Neumann, Max von 2, 3, 4, 6–7, 13, 14, 25–6 Neumann, Michael 14, 290n13 neural networks, artificial 226, 246 neuro-anatomy 228 neurons 122, 123, 125, 2298, 273, 275 artificial 125, 226, 276 neutrons, Monte Carlo bomb simulations 133–5, 136–7 New York 50, 188–9, 220 New York Times 110, 127, 135, 175, 177–8, 209 New Zealand 60, 177 Newman, James 219–20 Newman, Max 119 Nobel Prize 8, 60, 61, 63, 177, 178, 197 Noether, Emmy 51, 63–4 non-cooperative game theory 176, 177–8, 201, 203, 204–8 non-zero-sum games 172–5, 176–7, 204–8 Nordheim, Lothar 36, 41 Notestein, Frank W. 132 nuclear deterrence 183, 212–16, 218–21, 223–4 nuclear disarmament 209, 320n63 nuclear fission 77–8, 80, 86, 87, 91, 134–5, 136–7 Nuclear Operations Joint Publication 3–72 223–4 nuclear strategy counterforce deterrence 212–16, 218–21 doctrine of preventive war 208–10 and game theory 182, 204–9, 206, 212–16, 218–21 Massive Retaliation doctrine 210, 215, 221 preventive war 208–10 restraint 221–2 nuclear weapons research programme see Manhattan Project Office of Scientific Research and Development 77 ‘On Certain Equations of Economics and a Generalization of Brouwer’s Fixed-Point Theorem’ (von Neumann) 148 ‘On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem’ (Turing) 70, 121 On Thermonuclear War (Kahn) 219–20 Oncken, Wilhelm 4 Operation Crossroads 98 operations research 188, 189 operator theory 61–2 Oppenheimer, Robert AEC hearing 211–12 appointed to head Manhattan Project laboratory 81 appoints Kistiakowsky 84 and Bohm 53 communist links 81 innocence 212 ‘Now I am become Death the destroyer of worlds’ 92 and origin of atom bomb 78 recruits VN 82–3 small-scale test 88 stripped of security clearance 81, 212 supports implosion bomb design 82 and Target Committee 94 Trinity test 92 ordinality 23–4, 24 orthogonal polynomials 12–13 Ortvay, Rudolf 6–7, 70–1, 78 Ostrom, Elinor 178, 181 Oxford, University of 245, 269 Pais, Abraham 46 Papert, Seymour 276 Peierls, Rudolf 80, 99 Pennsylvania, University of, Moore School of Electrical Engineering 101, 105–11, 106, 122, 126, 128, 308 Penrose, Lionel 262 Penrose, Roger 262 Pentagon Papers 222 Péter, Rózsa 147 Petersen, Aage 57 Physics Today (journal) 58 Pinochet, Augusto 152 Piskunov, Max 253 Pitts, Walter 122, 123, 226 Planck, Max 29 Plesset, Ernst 216–18 plutonium xiii, 81–2, 84, 85, 86, 302n33 poker 148, 166–8, 168, 302n32 Poland, Nazi invasion of 77, 80 polonium 88, 90, 91 Pólya, George 11–12 Pomerene, James 139 Potsdam conference, 1945 89–90, 92 Pravda (Soviet newspaper) 183 Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship (RAND Corporation) 187 preventive war 208–10 Price, George 180 Price Equation, the 180 Princeton University 57, 155, 198 economics department 175 Einstein at 68, 69 extends VNs contract 63 Fine Hall 68 Institute for Advanced Study 68–72, 117–18, 127, 156, 211, 245 invites VN 49–50 Morgenstern joins 155–6 Office of Population Research 132 Turing at 70 VN at 65–6872, 66, 76 VN leaves 277–8 Princeton University Press 158 Prisoner’s Dilemma 181, 204–8, 206, 212, 272 program-controlled computers 119–20 Project Hippo 135 Project PX see ENIAC Project PY 110 Project Y see Manhattan Project: prospect theory 178 protein structure 227 purposive behaviour 227–8 Pythagoras’ theorem 16, 38 quantum computers 58 quantum entanglement 45, 55–7 quantum mechanics xii, 294n19 applications 58–9 boundary with classical physics 45 Copenhagen interpretation 46, 53–5, 54, 58–60, 296n43 critique of the Copenhagen interpretation 46–8 Dirac’s attempt to unify 36–7 dispersive ensembles 48–9 the EPR paradox 55–7 the Heisenberg cut 45 Heisenberg’s formulation 29–33, 32, 34, 36, 38, 46, 296n43 Hilbert and 36 lack of agreement on interpretation 42 ‘Many Worlds’ interpretation 57–8 matrix mechanics 30–33, 32, 35, 36–38, 39, 4630–3, 32, 35, 38 measurement problem 43–5, 57–8, 59, 296n43 nonlocality 55 origins of 29–30 relational interpretation 298n63 Schrödinger’s formulation 30, 33–6, 36, 38 and self-reproducing automata 243–4 and special relativity 55 uncertainty principle 33, 69, 294n11 utility 58–9 VNs impossibility proof 48–9,50–4 VNs unification of 30, 36, 37–9, 43–9 wave function collapse 43–4, 45, 46–8, 53, 53–4, 59 wave mechanics 30, 33–6 wave–particle duality 33–4, 42–3, 52–3 radiation implosion 99–100 RAND Corporation 182, 183–95 analysis of systems 189 break with Douglas Aircraft 187 Computer Science department 193 and computers 192–3 corporate ethos 187 duels studies 194–7 Economics Division 190, 192, 213 Evaluation of Military Worth 189 first report 187 focus 187 foundation 186–7 founding father 183–6 and game theory 188–9, 193–7, 204–9, 212–16, 218–21 and ICBM threat 216–18 JOHNNIAC 193, 194 little wars strategy 222–4 manifesto 188–9 Mathematics Division 213–16 Military Worth section 189, 195 name 186 Nash’s relationship with 202 non-cooperative Pair experiment 206–8 notoriety 183 Physics Division 216, 218–19 Selection and Use of Strategic Bases 214–15 Social Science division 190, 195, 213 VNs work for 190–1, 192–4, 195–6 Randell, Brian 103 randomness, power of 133–4 Rapoch, Andor 75 Rátz, László 11 Raymond, Arthur 186 Reagan, Ronald 152, 267 Real school 8–9, 9 Reed, Harry 106 RepRap 225–6, 235 REPRO starship 264 Reviews of Modern Physics (journal) 54 Richtmyer, Robert 133–54, 135 Riemann, Bernhard 18–19 Riesz, Frigyes 38–9 Rimini, Alberto 59 Robertson, Angela 676 Robertson, Howard Percy (“Bob”) 676 Rockefeller Foundation 29, 39, 50, 68, 153, 220 Romania 13–14 Rosenblatt, Frank 276 Rosenfeld, Léon 78 Roth, Alvin 178 Rovelli, Carlo 62, 298n63 Royal Air Force 188 Royal Navy 79–80 Russell, Bertrand 20–2, 26–7, 210, 219, 320n63 Russell’s paradox 21–2, 26–8 Rust, Bernhard 64 saddle points 146, 147 Samuelson, Paul 175 Santa Barbara, California 98 Santa Clara workshop, NASA 264, 265 Santa Fe 97 Savage, Leonard 146–7 Schelling, Thomas 178, 220–1, 224, 270, 271, 272 Schmidt, Erhard 26 Schrödinger, Erwin 30, 33–6, 42, 43, 45 critique of the Copenhagen interpretation 46–8 What Is Life?


pages: 362 words: 97,862

Physics in Mind: A Quantum View of the Brain by Werner Loewenstein

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, complexity theory, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, informal economy, information trail, Isaac Newton, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, Richard Feynman, stem cell, trade route, Turing machine

R. 1980. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Braid. New York: Vintage Books, Random House. Trakhtenbrot, B. A. 1963. Algorithms and Automatic Computing Machines. Boston: D.C. Heath & Co. Turing, A. 1936. On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem. Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society (2nd Series) 42:230–265. Turing, A. 1937. On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem: A correction. Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 43:544–546. Rendering the World by Computer Deutsch, D. 1985. Quantum theory, the Church-Turing principle and the universal quantum computer.

Gödel, K. 1931. On formally undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and related systems I. Monatsschrift für Mathematik und Physik 38:131–198. Prigogine, I. 1980. From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in Physical Sciences. San Francisco: Freeman. Turing, A. M. 1936/1937. On computable numbers, with an application to the entscheidungsproblem. Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society Series 2 42:230–265 and 43:544–546. A Note about Reality Carroll, Lewis. (1871) 1982. Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, Chapter VII. New York: Avenel Books. 14. Information Processing in the Brain Cell Organization in the Brain Braak, H. 1976.


pages: 523 words: 143,139

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths

4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, cognitive load, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, constrained optimization, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, David Sedaris, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, double helix, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, exponential backoff, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, first-price auction, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google Chrome, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, knapsack problem, Lao Tzu, Leonard Kleinrock, level 1 cache, linear programming, martingale, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, NP-complete, P = NP, packet switching, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert X Cringely, Sam Altman, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, sorting algorithm, spectrum auction, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, traveling salesman, Turing machine, urban planning, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

“a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet”: The Princess Bride, screenplay by William Goldman; 20th Century Fox, 1987. “anticipating the anticipations of others”: Attributed to Keynes in Gregory Bergman, Isms, Adams Media, 2006. it was the halting problem that inspired Turing: Alan Turing considers the halting problem and proposes the Turing machine in “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” and “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem. A Correction.” “poker players call it ‘leveling’”: Dan Smith, personal interview, September 11, 2014. “You don’t have deuce–seven”: This took place at the “Full Tilt Poker Durrrr Million Dollar Challenge,” held at Les Ambassadeurs Club in London, November 17–19, 2009, and was televised on Sky Sports.

Journal of Pragmatics 70 (2014): 152–164. Tracy, Brian. Eat That Frog! 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler, 2007. Turing, Alan M. “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” Read November 12, 1936. Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society s2-42, no. 1 (1937): 230–265. ______. “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem: A Correction.” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society s2-43, no. 1 (1938): 544–546. Tversky, Amos, and Ward Edwards. “Information Versus Reward in Binary Choices.”


pages: 444 words: 111,837

Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe by Paul Sen

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, Ernest Rutherford, heat death of the universe, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, traveling salesman, Turing complete, Turing test

He graduated three years later with a first-class degree and was chosen to be a “fellow” of the college, which meant an annual stipend of £300 (worth around £11,000 [$14,000] today) and the freedom to pursue his many mathematical interests. During this time Turing wrote the paper that, along with his wartime work as a code breaker, is the achievement he’s best known for. Published in 1936, the paper has the daunting title “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” The Entscheidungsproblem is a mathematical challenge that had been stated in its modern form in 1928 by David Hilbert, Emmy Noether’s mentor at the University of Göttingen. In simple terms, the problem asks if there is an automatic way of determining if any mathematical statement is true.

About a Microscope: See above. Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know: A book by Edwin Tenney Brewster. “How they find out when”: From above. “Hockey, or Watching the Daisies Grow”: Sara Turing drew the picture and sent it to the matron at Turing’s school in 1923. “On Computable Numbers”: “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” by Alan Turing, first published in Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, ser. 2, 42 (1936–37). Most historians now regard Turing’s Universal Machine: See chapter 6 of The Turing Guide by B. Jack Copeland. a fifteen-year-old Jewish refugee named Robert Augenfeld: See Alan Turing by Hodges and a brief essay by Augenfeld that was written shortly before he died.

Carnot), 21 nuclear bombs, 152 nuclear power, 109, 241, 244 Nüsslein-Volhard, Christiane, 215 “On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light” (Einstein), 145–48 “On a Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy” (Thomson), 59–61 “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” (Turing), 201 “On the Conservation of ‘Kraft,’ ” (Helmholtz), 47–49 Origin of Species, The (Darwin), 71 origins of universe. See creation of universe Ostwald, Wilhelm, 125, 151 ourworldindata website, 241 Oxford University, 5, 229 particle physics, 159 pattern analysis in information flow, 175, 177–80 letter frequency in, 177–79 letter pairs in, 179 single-letter frequency in, 177–79 spoken word statistical analysis in, 180 pattern formation in morphogenesis hair follicles example of, 215–16 hand shapes and, 217 sand dune example of, 210 Turing’s cannibal-missionary model in, 208, 216–17 Turing’s research on, 207–10, 214, 215, 217 Wolpert’s PI model of, 214–16, 217 Pauli, Wolfgang, 160 Penrose, Roger, 229 Penzias, Arno, 158 perpetual motion machine Carnot’s concept of an ideal engine as, 18, 46 Helmholtz’s research on steam engine efficiency and, 46–47 Szilard on possibility of, 191, 192 Perrin, Jean, 150–51 phase changes refrigeration and, 109–12 thermodynamic maps tracking, 109 phenomenalism, 124–25 photoelectric effect of light, 146 photon, first use of word, 146 photosynthesis, 121–23, 199 phyllotaxis, Turing’s formulas for, 212 physics Bekenstein on career in, 231 black hole entropy and radiation’s domination of, 236 Boltzmann’s education in, 95, 97, 98 Boltzmann’s entropy equation and, 117 Clausius’s statement of laws of thermodynamics and, 70 grand unified theory and, 236 Helmholtz’s paper on the conservation of Kraft (energy) and, 47–49 laws of thermodynamics and, ix, 219 Maxwell’s introduction of probability into, 86 Noether’s theorem on laws of, 157–59 Planck’s discoveries and eras in, 142 teaching of, in eighteenth-century universities, 5 Thomson’s work with Regnault on research in, 34–35 physics laboratory, Cambridge University, 93–94 Pilot ACE computer, 204 PI (positional information) model, in morphogenesis, 214–16, 217 Planck, Max, 137–42 background and education of, 125 Boltzmann’s contribution to discovery of quanta and, 142 Boltzmann’s work with early criticism from, 125, 133, 137, 140, 145 Boltzmann’s work with later support from, 133, 140, 141, 142 cavity radiators measurements and, 138–42 Einstein’s paper on work of, 145 heat radiation research of, 133, 137–38 probability and statistics used by, 140 quanta discovery and naming by, 142 plants formulas phyllotaxis in, 212 photosynthesis in, 121–23, 199 Polytechnic School, Paris, 8, 9, 20, 34 positional information (PI) model, in morphogenesis, 214–16, 217 potential energy, 48, 52 power generation, thermodynamic maps on efficiency of, 109 Priestley, Joseph, 5 principle of equivalence, 221, 223 Principles of Geology (Lyell), 70 probabilistic explanations Boltzmann’s research on entropy and, 124 Boltzmann’s theory on second law of thermodynamics using, 137 phenomenalism debate and, 124 probabilistic nature of quantum theory, 161 probabilities Einstein’s use of, to grasp underlying reality of molecules, 160–61 Herschel’s use of, in astronomy, 86 Maxwell’s use of, 86–88 Planck’s use of, 140 Prussia, steam engines in, 41–42, 43 Prussian Academy of Sciences, Berlin, 224 quanta Boltzmann’s role in discovery of, 142 Einstein’s research on, 147, 160, 161, 233 Planck’s naming of, 142 Planck’s paper on, 142 quantum mechanics, 160, 236 quantum physics birth of, 142 Boltzmann’s contribution to, 142 Einstein’s paper on light and, 146 Planck’s research and birth of, 142 quantum theory Einstein’s contributions to, 146, 159–61 Hawking’s investigation of black holes and, 235–36 radiation cavity radiators measurements in, 138–41 heat transfer using, 133–34, 137–38 radioactive dating, 72–73 radio communications systems, Turing’s experience with, 206 radio waves, Maxwell’s discovery of, 136, 187 railways, Gibbs’s early interest in, 105 random fluctuation hypothesis on creation of the universe, 129–30 Rayleigh, John William Strutt, 3rd Baron, 138–40 redundancies data networks with, 182 spoken language with, 181–82 written language degeneration and, 182–83 Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire (S.


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Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty by Vikram Chandra

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, British Empire, business process, Californian Ideology, Charles Babbage, conceptual framework, create, read, update, delete, crowdsourcing, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, East Village, European colonialism, finite state, Firefox, Flash crash, functional programming, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, haute couture, hype cycle, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, land reform, London Whale, Norman Mailer, Paul Graham, pink-collar, revision control, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, tech worker, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, theory of mind, Therac-25, Turing machine, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce

Chapter 10: Application.Restart() 1. Muller-Ortega, “Seal of Sambhu,” 574. 2. “Fwd: Amar Chitra Katha Comics in Samskritam: Participate in Readership Survey—Google Groups.” 3. Singh, “New Life, Old Death for Sanskrit in Uttarakhand.” 4. Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, loc. 2867–870. 5. Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungs-problem (1936).” 6. Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, loc. 2131–133. 7. Gleick, The Information, loc. 2048–052. 8. Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 18–19. 9. Fishwick, “Aesthetic Computing.” 10. Hessel, Goodman, and Kotler, “Hacking the President’s DNA.” 11.

Accessed February 3, 2013. http://www.ioccc.org/. Toole, Betty Alexandra. Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: Poetical Science. Sausalito: Critical Connection, 2010. Kindle Edition. Torvalds, Linus. “Re: Stable Linux 2.6.25.10.” Gmane.org, July 15, 2008. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/706950. Turing, Alan. “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungs-problem (1936).” In The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour through Alan Turing’s Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine, by Charles Petzold. Indianapolis: Wiley, 2008. Urban, Hugh B. The Economics of Ecstasy: Tantra, Secrecy, and Power in Colonial Bengal.


pages: 523 words: 154,042

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

A “reverse” Turing Test has a computer judge and a human subject trying to appear human. CAPTCHA—the irritating image-recognition challenge that websites use for detecting bots—stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” principles of metacode: Alan Turing, “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 1936, 230–65. solvable problem: Computers cannot solve every problem, because, as Turing showed, and as I will explain in the Epilogue, most problems are not solvable by computers, humans, or any computational device that uses finite procedures.

It is made up entirely from the letters ‘A’, ‘C’, ‘D’, ‘L’, ‘R’, ‘N’, and from ‘;.’ If finally we replace ‘A’ by ‘1’, ‘C’ by ‘2’, ‘D’ by ‘3’, ‘L’ by ‘4’, ‘R’ by ‘5’, ‘N’ by ‘6’, and ‘;’. by ‘7’ we shall have a description of the machine in the form of an arabic numeral.” Alan Turing, “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 1936, 241–42. the following encoding scheme: Turing had gotten this core insight from Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, in which Gödel figured out how a mathematical statement could talk about itself. See Kurt Gödel, “Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I,” Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 37 (1931): 173–98.

Converting back to decimal, we get 19, 22, 5, and 46. Treating them as ASCII values, we get T, W, F, and u. Thus, TWFu is the Base 64 encoding of Man. Turing’s physicality principle: “According to my definition, a number is computable if its decimal can be written down by a machine.” Alan Turing, “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 1936, 230. compute the correct answer: Here’s a simple example. Suppose you wanted to know whether a string of numbers has three 1s in it. Feed a tape with the string into your Turing Machine. The machine begins in state 0 with its head over the left end of the tape.


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Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI by John Brockman

AI winter, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, finite state, friendly AI, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, information retrieval, invention of writing, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, Loebner Prize, machine translation, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Picturephone, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, telerobotics, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, you are the product, zero-sum game

One can imagine a different contingent version of our intellectual and technological history had Alan Turing and John von Neumann, both of whom made major contributions to the foundations of computing, not appeared on the scene. Turing contributed a fundamental model of computation—now known as a Turing Machine—in his paper “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” written and revised in 1936 and published in 1937. In these machines, a linear tape of symbols from a finite alphabet encodes the input for a computational problem and also provides the working space for the computation. A different machine was required for each separate computational problem; later work by others would show that in one particular machine, now known as a Universal Turing Machine, an arbitrary set of computing instructions could be encoded on that same tape.

., 222 Minsky, Marvin, 7, 262, 271 Mithen, Steven, 17 model-blind mode of learning, 16–17, 19 Moore, Gordon, 169 Moore’s Law, 8, 9–11 “More Is Different” (Anderson), 68 Müller, Vincent, 80 Musk, Elon, xxvi, 9 NAO, 250 nation-state superintelligences, 172–75 neural networks, 270–71 New Cinema (Expanded Cinema Festival), xvi Newell, Allen, 130 new perceptions arising from new technologies, xvi–xviii Ng, Andrew, 26 non-imminence of human-level AI argument against AI risk, 27 Norvig, Peter, 141 “no smarter than humans” argument against AI risk, 28 objective (algorist) method of prediction, 233–35 scientific objectivity, 235–39 Obrist, Hans Ulrich, 206–18 AI visualization programs, 211–13 art and science, relation between, 209–10, 214–16 art as alarm system for new development, 208 artificial stupidity, 210–11 background and overview of work of, 206–7 computers as creativity aids, 213–14 simulations, and AI, 216–18 obsolescent, reasons behind rush to make humans, 82–84 Odd John (Stapledon), 75 Omohundro, Steve, 25 “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” (Turing), 57 open algorithms, 204 Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 96 optimistic AI scenario, in relation of machine superintelligences to hybrid superintelligences, 177 Orwell, George, 105, 106 Pagels, Heinz, xxiii Paglen, Trevor, 212 Paik, Nam June, 208, 259 Papert, Seymour, 271 parallel computing, xxiii–xxiv Pareto-topia, 98 Parreno, Philippe, 263–64 Pask, Gordon, 259 Pavlov, Ivan, 222 Peano, Giuseppe, 275–76 Pearl, Judea, xx, 13–19 background and overview of work of, 13–14 causal reasoning, 17–19 deep-learning, on lack of transparency in and limitations of, 15–19 human brain as nontransparent system argument, 15–16 on model-blind modes of learning, 16–17, 19 Pentland, Alex, 192–205 background and overview of work of, 192–93 credit-assignment function, applied to humans, 197–200 credit-assignment function, for AI, 196–97 culture in evolution, selecting for, 198–99 data used by AI, control over and review of, 203–4 human-AI ecologies, development of, 195–96 income inequality, 201–2 networks/ecosystems, working with, 194–95 next-generation AI, designing, 204–5 social sampling, 198–99 trust networks, building, 200–201 perception, and new technologies, xvi–xviii perceptron, 271 Perceptrons (Minsky and Papert), 271 Pinker, Steven, 100–112, 118 on AI dystopias, 108–12 background and overview of work of, 100–101 on computational theory of mind, 102–3 dystopian futures, flaws in, 105 on subjugation fear in AI scenarios, 108–10 on surveillance state dystopias, 105–7 on value alignment threat of AI, 110–11 on Wiener, 103–5, 112 Pitts, Walter, 270–71, 274 Plato, 222–23, 226 Poggio, Tomaso, 10 Popper, Karl, 116 Possible Minds Project, goal of, xxiv–xxv Principia Mathematica (Whitehead and Russell), 275 provably beneficial AI, templates for, 29–32 purposefulness, identifying, 281–84 putting purpose into machines, 23–25.


pages: 339 words: 92,785

I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict by Kenneth Payne

Abraham Maslow, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, classic study, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, functional programming, Geoffrey Hinton, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, machine translation, military-industrial complex, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological determinism, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, zero-sum game

.: Princeton University Press, 2005 and Tetlock, Philip E., and Dan Gardner. Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. London: Random House, 2015. 12. The best biography is Hodges, Andrew. Alan Turing: The Enigma. London: Burnett, 1983 and for his solution see, Turing, Alan Mathison. ‘On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem’, J. of Math 58, no. 345–363 (1936): 5. 13. On Shannon, see Gertner, Jon. The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. New York: Penguin Press, 2012. 14. On von Neumann, see Poundstone, William. Prisoner’s Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb.

‘The evolution of reciprocal altruism’, The Quarterly Review of Biology 46, no. 1 (1971): 35–57. Tucker, Patrick. ‘Marines are building robotic war balls’, Defense One, 12 February 2015, https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2015/02/marines-are-building-robotic-war-balls/105258/. Turing, Alan Mathison. ‘On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem.’ J. of Math 58, no. 345–363 (1936): 5. Turing, Alan Mathison. ‘Computing machinery and intelligence’, Mind, Volume LIX, Issue 236, October 1950, pp. 433–460, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433. Twilley, Nicola. ‘Seeing with your tongue,’ The New York Times, 8 May 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/15/seeing-with-your-tongue.


pages: 855 words: 178,507

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, bank run, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, citation needed, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pre–internet, quantum cryptography, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Simon Singh, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, talking drums, the High Line, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, Turing test, women in the workforce, yottabyte

The twentieth century gave algorithms a central role—beginning here. Turing was a fellow and a recent graduate at King’s College, Cambridge, when he presented his computable-numbers paper to his professor in 1936. The full title finished with a flourish in fancy German: it was “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” The “decision problem” was a challenge that had been posed by David Hilbert at the 1928 International Congress of Mathematicians. As perhaps the most influential mathematician of his time, Hilbert, like Russell and Whitehead, believed fervently in the mission of rooting all mathematics in a solid logical foundation—“In der Mathematik gibt es kein Ignorabimus,” he declared.

♦ “NO, I’M NOT INTERESTED IN DEVELOPING A POWERFUL BRAIN”: Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (London: Vintage, 1992), 251. ♦ “A CONFIRMED SOLITARY”: Max H. A. Newman to Alonzo Church, 31 May 1936, quoted in Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing, 113. ♦ “THE JUSTIFICATION … LIES IN THE FACT”: Alan M. Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 42 (1936): 230–65. ♦ “IT WAS ONLY BY TURING’S WORK”: Kurt Gödel to Ernest Nagel, 1957, in Kurt Gödel: Collected Works, vol. 5, ed. Solomon Feferman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 147. ♦ “YOU SEE … THE FUNNY LITTLE ROUNDS”: letter from Alan Turing to his mother and father, summer 1923, AMT/K/1/3, Turing Digital Archive, http://www.turingarchive.org

IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 18, no. 3 (1996): 4–12. ———. Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: Prophet of the Computer Age. Mill Valley, Calif.: Strawberry Press, 1998. Tufte, Edward R. “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint.” Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Press, 2003. Turing, Alan M. “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 42 (1936): 230–65. ———. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Minds and Machines 59, no. 236 (1950): 433–60. ———. “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B 237, no. 641 (1952): 37–72.


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The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

There wasn’t a way to build a thinking machine—the processes, materials, and power weren’t yet available—and so the theory couldn’t be tested. The leap from theoretical thinking machines to computers that began to mimic human thought happened in the 1930s with the publication of two seminal papers: Claude Shannon’s “A Symbolic Analysis of Switching and Relay Circuits” and Alan Turing’s “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” As an electrical engineering student at MIT, Shannon took an elective course in philosophy—an unusual diversion. Boole’s An Investigation of the Laws of Thought became the primary reference for Shannon’s thesis. His advisor, Vannevar Bush, encouraged him to map Boolean logic to physical circuits.

See also Transparency standards Transparency standards: establishment of for Big Nine, 251; establishment of global, 252 Tribes, AI: anti-humanistic bias in, 57; characteristics, 56; groupthink, 53; homogeneity, 52; lack of diversity, 56; leaders, 53–65; need to address diversity within, 57–58; sexual assault and harassment by members, 55–56; unconscious bias training programs and, 56; unconscious biases of members, 52; university education and homogeneity of members, 58–61, 64 Trudeau, Justin, 236 TrueNorth neuromorphic chip, 92 Trump, Donald: administration, 70, 75, 85; campaign climate change comments, 75; science and technology research budget cuts, 243 Turing, Alan, 24–25, 26, 27–29, 30, 31, 35, 259; morphogenesis theory, 204; neural network concept, 27–29;“On Computable Numbers, With an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” 24. See also Turing Test Turing test, 27–28, 50, 146, 169, 184 Turriano, Juanelo: mechanical monk creation of, 18, 25 Tversky, Amos, 108 2000 HUB5 English, 181 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2, 35: HAL 9000, 2, 35, 39 U.S. Army: ENIAC, 27; Futures Command, 212 U.S.


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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, brain emulation, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, double helix, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, George Gilder, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, linear programming, Loebner Prize, mandelbrot fractal, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

Chapter 8: The Mind as Computer 1. Salomon Bochner, A Biographical Memoir of John von Neumann (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1958). 2. A. M. Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society Series 2, vol. 42 (1936–37): 230–65, http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/activities/ieg/e-library/sources/tp2-ie.pdf. A. M. Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem: A Correction,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 43 (1938): 544–46. 3. John von Neumann, “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC,” Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, June 30, 1945.


God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History by Stephen Hawking

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, G4S, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, p-value, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, the long tail, three-masted sailing ship, tontine, Turing machine

Suppose that in a certain complete configuration the numbers representing the successive symbols on the tape are s1 s2 . . . sn, that the m-th symbol is scanned, and that the m-configuration has the number t; then we may represent this complete configuration by the formula ON COMPUTABLE NUMBERS, WITH AN APPLICATION TO THE ENTSCHEIDUNGSPROBLEM. A CORRECTION In a paper entitled “On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem”[1] the author gave a proof of the insolubility of the Entscheidungsproblem of the “engere Funktionenkalkül”. This proof contained some formal errors[2] which will be corrected here: there are also some other statements in the same paper which should be modified, although they are not actually false as they stand.

Selections from Henri Lebesgue’s Integrale, Longeur, Aire reprinted from Annali di Matematica, Pura ed Applicata, 1902, Ser. 3, vol. 7, pp. 231–359. Kurt Gödel’s On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems, trans. B. Meltzer, courtesy of Dover Publications. Alan Turing’s On computable numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society courtesy of the London Mathematical Society. Picture Credits: Euclid: Getty Images. Archimedes: Getty Images. Diophantus: Title page of Diophanti Alexandrini Arthimeticorum libri sex. . . ., 1621: Library of Congress, call number QA31.D5, Rare Book/Special Collections Reading Room, (Jefferson LJ239).

CONTENTS Introduction EUCLID (C. 325BC–265BC) His Life and Work Selections from Euclid’s Elements Book I: Basic Geometry—Definitions, Postulates, Common Notions; and Proposition 47, (leading up to the Pythagorean Theorem) Book V: The Eudoxian Theory of Proportion—Definitions & Propositions Book VII: Elementary Number Theory—Definitions & Propositions Book IX: Proposition 20: The Infinitude of Prime Numbers Book IX: Proposition 36: Even Perfect Numbers Book X: Commensurable and Incommensurable Magnitudes ARCHIMEDES (287BC–212BC) His Life and Work Selections from The Works of Archimedes On the Sphere and Cylinder, Books I and II Measurement of a Circle The Sand Reckoner The Methods DIOPHANTUS (C. 200–284) His Life and Work Selections from Diophantus of Alexandria, A Study in the History of Greek Algebra Book II Problems 8–35 Book III Problems 5–21 Book V Problems 1–29 RENÉ DESCARTES (1596–1650) His Life and Work The Geometry of Rene Descartes ISAAC NEWTON (1642–1727) His Life and Work Selections from Principia On First and Last Ratios of Quantities LEONHARD EULER (1707–1783) His Life and Work On the sums of series of reciprocals (De summis serierum reciprocarum) The Seven Bridges of Konigsberg Proof that Every Integer is A Sum of Four Squares PIERRE SIMON LAPLACE (1749–1827) His Life and Work A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities JEAN BAPTISTE JOSEPH FOURIER (1768–1830) His Life and Work Selection from The Analytical Theory of Heat Chapter III: Propagation of Heat in an Infinite Rectangular Solid (The Fourier series) CARL FRIEDRICH GAUSS (1777–1855) His Life and Work Selections from Disquisitiones Arithmeticae (Arithmetic Disquisitions) Section III Residues of Powers Section IV Congruences of the Second Degree AUGUSTIN-LOUIS CAUCHY (1789–1857) His Life and Work Selections from Oeuvres complètes d’Augustin Cauchy Résumé des leçons données à l’École Royale Polytechnique sur le calcul infinitésimal (1823), series 2, vol. 4 Lessons 3–4 on differential calculus Lessons 21–24 on the integral NIKOLAI IVANOVICH LOBACHEVSKY (1792–1856) His Life and Work Geometrical Researches on the Theory of Parallels JÁNOS BOLYAI (1802–1860) His Life and Work The Science of Absolute Space ÉVARISTE GALOIS (1811–1832) His Life and Work On the conditions that an equation be soluble by radicals Of the primitive equations which are soluble by radicals On Groups and Equations and Abelian Integrals GEORGE BOOLE (1815–1864) His Life and Work An Investigation of the Laws of Thought BERNHARD RIEMANN (1826–1866) His Life and Work On the Representability of a Function by Means of a Trigonometric Series (Ueber die Darstellbarkeit eine Function durch einer trigonometrische Reihe) On the Hypotheses which lie at the Bases of Geometry (Ueber die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen) On the Number of Prime Numbers Less than a Given Quantity (Ueber die Anzahl der Primzahlen unter einer gegebenen Grösse) KARL WEIERSTRASS (1815–1897) His Life and Work Selected Chapters on the Theory of Functions, Lecture Given in Berlin in 1886, with the Inaugural Academic Speech, Berlin 1857 § 7 Gleichmässige Stetigkeit (Uniform Continuity) RICHARD DEDEKIND (1831–1916) His Life and Work Essays on the Theory of Numbers GEORG CANTOR (1848–1918) His Life and Work Selections from Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers Articles I and II HENRI LEBESGUE (1875–1941) His Life and Work Selections from Integrale, Longeur, Aire (Intergral, Length, Area) Preliminaries and Integral KURT GÖDEL (1906–1978) His Life and Work On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems ALAN TURING (1912–1954) His Life and Work On computable numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society INTRODUCTION WE ARE LUCKY TO LIVE IN AN AGE LN WHICH WE ARE STILL MAKING DISCOVERIES. IT IS LIKE THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA-YOU ONLY DISCOVER IT ONCE. THE AGE IN WHICH WE LIVE IS THE AGE IN WHICH WE ARE DISCOVERING THE FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF NATURE . . .


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Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, discrete time, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Long Term Capital Management, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, scientific worldview, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine

., Alan Turing: The Enigma. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983, p. 92. “Turing killed off the third”: Another mathematician, Alonzo Church, also proved that there are undecidable statements in mathematics, but Turing’s results ended up being more influential. “his answer, again, was ‘no’ ”: Turing, A. M., On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem. Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 2(42), 1936, pp. 230–265. “According to his biographer Hao Wang”: Wang, H., Reflections on Kurt Gödel. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. Chapter 5 “All great truths begin as blasphemies”: Shaw, G.

On the decrease of entropy in a thermodynamic system by the intervention of intelligent beings. Zeitschrift fuer Physik, 53, 1929, pp. 840–856. Tattersall, I. Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness. New York: Harvest Books, 1999. Travis, J. Eye-opening gene. Science News Online, May 10, 1997. Turing, A. M. On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem. Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 2(42), 1936, pp. 230–265. Ulam, S. M. and von Neumann, J. On combination of stochastic and deterministic processes (abstract). Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 53, 1947, 1120. Varn, D.


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In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence by George Zarkadakis

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Asperger Syndrome, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business process, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, continuous integration, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Edward Snowden, epigenetics, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, intentional community, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, machine translation, millennium bug, mirror neurons, Moravec's paradox, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, post-industrial society, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

., and Naccache, L. (2001), ‘Towards a cognitive neuroscience of consciousness: basic evidence of a workspace framework’, in: Cognition, 79 (1–2), pp. 1-37. 7Artificial Intelligence split from cybernetics in the summer of 1956 with its inaugural conference in Dartmouth, New Hampshire, one year before von Neumann’s death. 8Turing, A. M. (1936), ‘On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem’, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 2 (1937), 42, pp. 230–65. 9To be more accurate, Gödel encoded metamathematical statements within ordinary arithmetic. 10The incomplete manuscript and notes based on a series of lectures given by von Neumann at the University of Illinois in 1949 was assembled and edited by Arthur Burks and published ten years after von Neumann’s death. 11New findings in epigenetics show that the mechanism of passing hereditary features to future generations is more complex than previously thought, and probably involves other systems in the cell beyond DNA replication. 12The human mind may be beyond logical coding (as Gödel has indirectly showed) but it is not beyond computation.

That was the actual statement that Gödel ‘formalised’. 14To be more precise, Gödel proved that for any computable axiomatic system that is powerful enough to describe arithmetic of the natural numbers (e.g. the Peano axioms) the consistency of the axioms cannot be proven within the system. 15Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle essentially states that we can never know everything about a quantum phenomenon. Therefore, nature will remain forever at least partially unknown to us. 16Turing, A. M. (1936), ‘On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem’, in: Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 1937, Vol. 2, No. 42, pp. 230–65. 17The American mathematician Alonzo Church independently published his proof of the Entscheidungsproblem for the American Mathematical Society using a method called ‘lamda calculus’, and therefore the solution is known as the Turing-Church theorem.


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Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again by Eric Topol

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, bioinformatics, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital twin, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, fault tolerance, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Santayana, Google Glasses, ImageNet competition, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, move 37, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, post-truth, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, techlash, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, War on Poverty, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population

A BRIEF HISTORY With all the chatter and buzz about AI these days, it would be easy to think it was some kind of new invention, but, conceptually, it goes back at least eighty years. In 1936 Alan Turing published a paper on powerful, automated, intelligent systems—a universal computer—titled “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.”13 I don’t understand the multitude of equations in this thirty-six-page gem, but I must agree with his statement, “We are now in a position to show that the Entscheidungsproblem cannot be solved,” both because I can’t say it and still don’t have a clue what it is!

., “Algorithmic Life,” Los Angeles Review of Books. 2017. 10. Harari, Y. N., Homo Deus. 2016. New York: HarperCollins, p. 348. 11. Harari, Homo Deus. 12. Beam, A. L., and I. S. Kohane, “Big Data and Machine Learning in Health Care.” JAMA, 2018. 319(13): pp. 1317–1318. 13. Turing, A. M., “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 1936. 42(1): pp. 230–265. doi: 10.1112/plms/s2-42.1.230. 14. Turing, A. M., “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind, 1950. 49: pp. 433–460. https://www.csee.umbc.edu/courses/471/papers/turing.pdf. 15.


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Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology by Howard Rheingold

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bletchley Park, card file, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Hacker Ethic, heat death of the universe, Howard Rheingold, human-factors engineering, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, popular electronics, post-industrial society, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The Home Computer Revolution, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

Turing then proved that for any formal system, there exists a Turing machine that can be programmed to imitate it. This kind of general formal system with the ability to imitate any other formal system was what Turing was getting at. These systems are now known as "universal Turing machines." The theory was first stated in a paper with the forbidding title "On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem." The Turing Machine was a hypothetical device Turing invented on the way to settling a critical question about the foundations of mathematics as a formalized means of thinking. He showed that his device could solve infinitely many problems, but that there are some problems that cannot be solved because there is no way of predicting in advance whether or when the machine is going to stop.

[10] George Boole, An investigation of the Laws of Thought, on Which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities (London: Macmillan, 1854; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1958), 1-3 [11]Leon E Truesdell, The Development of Punch Card Tabulation in the Bureau of the Census, 1890-1940 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965), 30-31. [12] Ibid., 31. Chapter Three: The First Hacker and his Imaginary Machine [1] Alan M. Turing, "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem," Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, second series, vol. 42, part 3, November 12, 1936, 230-265. [2] An amusing example of an easily constructed Turing machine, using pebbles and toilet paper, is given in the third chapter of Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (San Francisco: W.


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Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics by David Berlinski

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Douglas Hofstadter, Eratosthenes, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Murray Gell-Mann, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine, William of Occam

Some years after Gödel presented his results, the American logician Alonzo Church defined what he called the lambda-computable functions. And to roughly the same point since the recursive and the lambda-computable functions, although quite different, did the same thing and carried on in the same way. In 1936, Alan Turing published the first of his papers on computability, “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” and so gave the idea of an algorithm a vivid and unforgettable metaphor. An effective calculation is any calculation that could be undertaken, Turing argued, by an exceptionally simple imaginary machine, or even a human computer, someone who has, like a clerk in the department of motor vehicles or a college dean, been stripped of all cognitive powers and can as a result execute only a few primitive acts.


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The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible by Lance Fortnow

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, Donald Knuth, Erdős number, four colour theorem, Gerolamo Cardano, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, linear programming, new economy, NP-complete, Occam's razor, P = NP, Paul Erdős, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, smart grid, Stephen Hawking, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William of Occam

Trakhtenbrot, “A Survey of Russian Approaches to Prebor (Brute-Force Search) Algorithms,” Annals of the History of Computing 6, no. 4 (October 1984): 384–400. Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” Bulletin of Mathematical Biology 5, no. 4 (1943): 115–33. Panel discussion, Complexity of Computer Computations 40, no. 4 (1972): 169–85. Alan Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 42 (1936): 230–65. S. Yablonsky, “On the Impossibility of Eliminating PEREBOR in Solving Some Problems of Circuit Theory,” Doklady Akademii Nauk SSSR 124 (1959): 44–47. Y. Zhuravlev, “On the Impossibility of Constructing Minimal Disjunctive Normal Forms for Boolean Functions by Algorithms of a Certain Class, Doklady Akademii Nauk SSSR 132 (1960): 504–6.


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Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan L. Ensmenger, Jeffrey R. Yost

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Byte Shop, card file, cashless society, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, deskilling, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Jenner, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, garden city movement, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, Herman Kahn, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, natural language processing, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pirate software, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, Turing machine, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, young professional

Alan Turing was born in 1912 and at school he was drawn to science and practical experimenting. He won a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge University, and graduated in mathematics with the highest honors in 1934. He became a Fellow of King’s College and, in 1936, published his classic paper “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” in which he described the Turing Machine. Turing showed that not all mathematical questions were decidable, and that one could not always determine whether or not a mathematical function was computable. For nonmathematicians this was an obscure concept to grasp, although later—after World War II—Turing explained the idea in an article in Science News.

See NCR National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), 66, 72, 74, 145 National Science Foundation (NSF), 292 National Semiconductor, 221 Nature, 41, 59, 299–300 Nautical Almanac, 4, 7, 47, 52–53 Navigation tables, 4, 47, 53 NCR accounting machines, 31, 38, 53, 117 acquisition of CRC, 117 business software, 122 business strategies of, 30, 34, 123–124, 132 cash registers, 31–32 computer industry and, 98 digital computing machines, 54 as IBM competitor, 133 non-IBM-compatible computers of, 132 postwar business challenges, 103 punched-card systems, 21, 38 role in computer industry, 21, 117 sales strategies of, 30, 31–32, 36 scanning technology, 164 as software contractors, 177 technical innovation by, 31 user training, 30 Nelson, Ted, 234–235, 237, 279, 286 Netiquette, 285 Netscape Communications Corporation, 289–290 Network analyzers, 48, 50 Network protocols, 285 Networks, 275 New Communalists, 234 New Deal projects, 39 New Product Line (IBM), 126–128, 129 Newman, Max, 82 Nokia, 297, 298 Non-IBM-compatible computers, 132 Norris, William, 99, 124, 249 Northrop Aircraft Corporation, 101, 102, 105, 116 Notation, programming, 168 Notebook computers, 296, 298 Noyce, Robert, 219–221, 222, 231, 249 Noyes, Eliot, 120 Nuclear weapons, 65, 74, 78, 109, 127, 149 Numerical meteorology, 50–52 Office machine industry. See Business machine industry Office of Naval Research (ONR), 147–148, 150 Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), 49, 65–66, 74 Office systematizers, 19, 134 Olivetti, 197, 251 Olsen, Kenneth, 217–218 Omidyar, Pierre, 295 “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” (Turing), 60 Opel, John, 246 Open-source software, 215, 288, 296 Operating systems for mainframe computers, 179–182, 205, 206, 210, 212–215 for mobile devices, 297, 298 for personal computers, 242–243, 246–247, 253–254, 257–258, 264–267 See also specific operating systems Optical character recognition, 164 OS/2 operating system, 265, 266 OS/360 operating system, 179–182, 183, 212 Osborne 1 computer, 198 (photo), 296 Outsourcing of components and software, 245–246, 247 Oxford English Dictionary, 3 Packaged software programs, 186–188, 254 Packard, David, 249 Packet-switching technology, 281–282 Page, Larry, 294 Palm, Inc., 297, 298 Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), 260, 261, 280, 296 Papian, Bill, 150 Parker, Sean, 301 Pascal programming language, 185 Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (C.


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The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, fudge factor, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information retrieval, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, ought to be enough for anybody, pattern recognition, phenotype, punch-card reader, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

Fatmi and R. W Young, “A Definition of Intelligence,” Nature 228 (1970): 97. 16 Alan Turing showed that the essential basis of computation could be modeled with a very simple theoretical machine. He created the first theoretical computer in 1936 (first introduced in Alan M. Turing, “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheinungs Problem,” Proc. London Math. Soc. 42 [1936]: 230-265) in an eponymous conception called the Turing machine. As with a number of Turing’s breakthroughs, he would have both the first and last word. The Turing machine represented the founding of modern computational theory.

_______. Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1997. Turing, Alan. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Reprinted in Minds and Machines, edited by Alan Ross Anderson. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964. ________. “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem ” Proceedings, London Mathematical Society, 2, no. 42 (1936). Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984. Tye, Michael. Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representational Theory of the Phenomenal Mind.


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The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

Later, the formalization of logic within the philosophy mathematics (from Pierre-Simon Laplace, to Gottlob Frege, Georg Cantor, David Hilbert, and so many others) helped to introduce, inform, and ultimately disprove a version of the Enlightenment as the expression of universal deterministic processes (of both thought and physics). In 1936, with his now-famous paper, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” a very young Alan Turing at once introduced the theoretical basis of modern computing and demonstrated the limits of what could and could not ever be calculated and computed by a universal technology. Turing envisioned his famous “machine” according to the tools of his time to involve an infinite amount of “tape” divided into cells that can store symbols, moved along a stationary read-write “head” that can alter those symbols, a “state register” that can map the current arrangement of symbols along the tape, and a “table” of instructions that tells the machine to rewrite or erase the symbol and to move the “head,” assuming a new state for the “register” to map.

Readers may reference the image at this book's companion website, thestack.org. 5.  Originally conceived in 1936 by twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing and called an “a-machine” (for “automatic machine”), it describes a hypothetical universal computer, which, given enough time and energy, would be capable of calculating any “computable” problem. In that paper, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungs Problem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Ser. 2 42 (1937), Turing demonstrates the range of problems that in fact are not computable. The figure of the Turing machine, as a philosophical and machinic hypothesis, stands for the technology of universal computation and for the ultimate limits of computation within mathematics. 6. 

See also User AI User, 277–279 algorithmic hardware, 348–349 animal User, 274–277 as co-User, 276–277, 349 designing for, 339 enrollment and motivation, 297–298 identifying, 345 machine User, 279–284 rights of, 345 nonpersonhood, 173–175 nonplace, end of, 16 non-state actors with nation-state functions, 10–11 nonvisual interfaces, 341, 424n41 Nortel patent bid, 134 North American Free Trade Agreement, 443n23 North Sea wind farms proposal (OMA), 181 No-Stop City project (Archizoom), 149–151, 160, 178–179 notational systems, 383n4 NSA/CSS Threat Operations Center, US, 441n8 Obama, Barack, 98, 180, 322 Obi-Wan Kenobi, 176 object identifiers, universal, 214–215 object-instruments, computational, 227 objects addressability, 214–215 agency of, 131 defined, 402n59 essentials of, 260 identifiers, digital, 207, 214–215 interface design, 230–235 memory of, 212, 215 non-citizen User, 188 object-to-object communication, 197, 210, 212, 216, 338 object-to-object spam, 216 reordering by, 206 semantic relations, 202–203 SPIME designation for, 201–204 as symbolic artifacts, 212 ocean exploration, 30 oceanic data centers, 113–114, 140 Oculus, 127 Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), 53, 99, 170, 178, 180–181 offshoring, 443n23 oil geopolity, 99 Oklahoma City Bombing guidelines, 322 “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” (Turing), 78 One57, New York, 311 One Riverside Park, New York, 311 OOZ (Jeremijenko), 276 Open, The (Agamben), 273 OpenFlow, 437n58 open government movement, 121 Open Stack, 174 open systems interconnection (OSI) network model, 61–63 Operation Centurion, Dr.


pages: 333 words: 64,581

Clean Agile: Back to Basics by Robert C. Martin

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Boeing 737 MAX, c2.com, cognitive load, continuous integration, DevOps, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Frederick Winslow Taylor, index card, iterative process, Kanban, Kubernetes, loose coupling, microservices, remote working, revision control, scientific management, Turing machine

I wish I could have been a fly on the wall when Alan Turing was writing his 1936 paper.1 My guess is that the many “programs” he wrote in that book were developed in small steps with plenty of desk checking. I also imagine that the first code he wrote for the Automatic Computing Engine, in 1946, was written in small steps, with lots of desk checking, and even some real testing. 1. Turing, A. M. 1936. On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem [proof]. Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 2 (published 1937), 42(1):230–65. The best way to understand this paper is to read Charles Petzold’s masterpiece: Petzold, C. 2008. The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour through Alan Turing’s Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine.


pages: 229 words: 67,599

The Logician and the Engineer: How George Boole and Claude Shannon Created the Information Age by Paul J. Nahin

air gap, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, Grace Hopper, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, knapsack problem, New Journalism, Pierre-Simon Laplace, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, thinkpad, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test, V2 rocket

In developing this view of a computing machine, Turing was not suggesting it as a practical design for an actual machine. Rather, as a mathematician he used his machines as a conceptual framework in which to study the limits on just what mechanistic devices can actually compute. Indeed, the title of his 1936 paper, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem’’—that final tongue-twister translates as “the decision problem’’—clearly shows Turing’s intent. His great accomplishment was to show that not all the numbers we can imagine are in fact actually computable. That is, Turing showed there are limits to what a computer—any computer—can do.


pages: 234 words: 67,589

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future by Ben Tarnoff

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, business logic, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, decentralized internet, deep learning, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial intermediation, future of work, gamification, General Magic , gig economy, God and Mammon, green new deal, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, lockdown, lone genius, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, smart grid, social distancing, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, techlash, Telecommunications Act of 1996, TikTok, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, UUNET, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, web application, working poor, Yochai Benkler

., “Lines of Sight,” Logic, December 20, 2020. 109, The sophistication of these systems … “Data imperative”: Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy, “Seeing Like a Market,” Socio-Economic Review 15, no. 1 (2017): 9–29. 110, The same individual … Smartphone usage: “Mobile Fact Sheet,” April 7, 2021, Pew Research Center. In the same period, smart-phones proliferated throughout the rest of the world as well: in 2019, the penetration rate reached just over 40 percent of the world’s population, some 3.2 billion people. 111, As a kind of networked intelligence … “Be used too: A. M. Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 2, no. 1 (1937): 241. 111, What if this universality became ubiquitous? The network is the computer: Tekla S. Perry, “Does the Repurposing of Sun Microsystems’ Slogan Honor History, or Step on It?,” IEEE Spectrum: View from the Valley, July 30, 2019. 111, Consider the “smart cooler” … Smart cooler: Sidney Fussell, “Now Your Groceries See You, Too,” The Atlantic, January 25, 2019; Lara O’Reilly, “Walgreens Tests Digital Cooler Doors with Cameras to Target You with Ads,” Wall Street Journal, January 11, 2019. 112, At least, this … Lara O’Reilly, “Walgreens Is Expanding Its Digital Cooler Doors Ad Network,” Digiday, February 3, 2020. 112, But, as with Google … Impossible to determine someone’s gender: Os Keyes, “The Body Instrumental,” Logic, December 7, 2019.


pages: 253 words: 80,074

The Man Who Invented the Computer by Jane Smiley

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Bletchley Park, British Empire, c2.com, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Henri Poincaré, IBM and the Holocaust, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Karl Jansky, machine translation, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Pierre-Simon Laplace, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Turing machine, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

Andrew Hodges, Turing’s biographer, points out that Turing’s idea “was not only a matter of abstract mathematics, not only a play of symbols, for it involved thinking about what people did in the physical world … His machines—soon to be called Turing Machines—offered a bridge, a connection between abstract symbols and the physical world. Indeed, his imagery was, for Cambridge, almost shockingly industrial.” In May 1936, Alan Turing submitted his paper, entitled “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” to the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society and then applied unsuccessfully for a Procter Fellowship at Princeton. As far as anyone in England knew, only Turing and the American Alonzo Church had come up with answers to the Entscheidungsproblem.


pages: 720 words: 197,129

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

Despite what Hilbert seemed to hope, no mechanical procedure can determine the provability of every mathematical statement. Gödel’s incompleteness theory, the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics, and Turing’s answer to Hilbert’s third challenge all dealt blows to a mechanical, deterministic, predictable universe. Turing’s paper was published in 1937 with the not so snappy title “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” His answer to Hilbert’s third question was useful for the development of mathematical theory. But far more important was the by-product of Turing’s proof: his concept of a Logical Computing Machine, which soon came to be known as a Turing machine. “It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,” he declared.10 Such a machine would be able to read the instructions of any other machine and carry out whatever task that machine could do.

., ref1 Nelson, Ted, ref1, ref2, ref3 Netscape, ref1 networks, ref1, ref2 data blocks in, ref1 distributed, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 lack of centralization in, ref1, ref2, ref3 packet switched, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Network Working Group, ref1 Neumann, Max, ref1 neural networks, ref1 neurons, ref1 Newman, Max, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 newsgroups, ref1 Newton, Isaac, ref1 New Yorker, ref1 New York Times, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 New York World’s Fair (1939), ref1, ref2, ref3 NeXT, ref1, ref2 Nishi, Kay, ref1 Nixon, Richard, ref1, ref2 NM Electronics, ref1 noncomputable numbers, ref1 North Carolina, University of, ref1 Norton, Larry, ref1 Norvig, Peter, ref1 Nova, ref1, ref2 Novack, Ken, ref1 Noyce, Robert, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13 corporate culture and, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Fairchild resignation of, ref1 Intel employees empowered by, ref1 Intel money raised by, ref1 Intel’s organization chart drawn by, ref1 microchip of, ref1, ref2 microprocessor and, ref1 in patent lawsuit, ref1 planar process and, ref1 resistor designed by, ref1 as Shockley’s replacement, ref1 on synergy, ref1 n-p-n junction architecture, ref1 NSFNET, ref1 n-type, ref1 Nuance Communications, ref1 nuclear weapons, ref1 Internet and, ref1 Nupedia, ref1, ref2, ref3 Nutting, Bill, ref1 Nutting Associates, ref1, ref2, ref3 Obama, Barack, ref1 Office of Defense Mobilization, ref1 Office of Scientific Research, ref1 Ohm’s Law, ref1 oil, ref1 Olsen, Ken, ref1 Olson, Judith, ref1 “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem“ (Turing), ref1, ref2 On Distributed Communications (Baran), ref1 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey), ref1 online communities, ref1 oNLine System (NLS), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (Somerville), ref1 Opel, John, ref1 open architecture, ref1, ref2 OpenOffice, ref1 open-sourcing, ref1, ref2 Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Fuller), ref1 operating systems, ref1 open-source, ref1 operations, ref1 Ordnance Department, U.S.


Know Thyself by Stephen M Fleming

Abraham Wald, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, backpropagation, citation needed, computer vision, confounding variable, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, global pandemic, higher-order functions, index card, Jeff Bezos, l'esprit de l'escalier, Lao Tzu, lifelogging, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, patient HM, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, recommendation engine, replication crisis, self-driving car, side project, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, traumatic brain injury

Trouche, Emmanuel, Petter Johansson, Lars Hall, and Hugo Mercier. “The Selective Laziness of Reasoning.” Cognitive Science 40, no. 8 (2016): 2122–2136. Tulving, Endel. “Memory and Consciousness.” Canadian Psychology/Psychologie canadienne 26, no. 1 (1985): 1–12. Turing, Alan Mathison. “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 42, no. 1 (1937): 230–265. Ullsperger, Markus, Helga A. Harsay, Jan R. Wessel, and K. Richard Ridderinkhof. “Conscious Perception of Errors and Its Relation to the Anterior Insula.” Brain Structure & Function 214, nos. 5–6 (2010): 629–643.


pages: 332 words: 93,672

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business, and the World (New York: Penguin Random House, 2016). Tegmark, Max. Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017). Turner, Fred. Burning Man at Google: A Cultural Infrastructure for New Media Production (Sage Journal, 2009). Turing, Alan. “On Computable Numbers, With An Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” (Princeton: Princeton Graduate Press, 1936). Turing, Alan. Systems of Logic, edited and introduced by Andrew W. Appel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). Vigna, Paul and Michael J. Casey, The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money are Challenging the Global Economic Order (New York: St.


pages: 370 words: 94,968

The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive by Brian Christian

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Blue Ocean Strategy, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, David Heinemeier Hansson, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, l'esprit de l'escalier, language acquisition, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Menlo Park, operational security, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, SimCity, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, starchitect, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Thales of Miletus, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979). 8 Mark Humphrys, “How My Program Passed the Turing Test,” in Parsing the Turing Test, edited by Robert Epstein et al. (New York: Springer, 2008). 9 V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (New York: William Morrow, 1998). 10 Alan Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 1937, 2nd ser., 42, no. 1 (1937), pp. 230–65. 11 Ada Lovelace’s remarks come from her translation (and notes thereupon) of Luigi Federico Menabrea’s “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage, Esq.,” in Scientific Memoirs, edited by Richard Taylor (London, 1843). 12 Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59, no. 236 (October 1950), pp. 433–60. 13 For more on the idea of “radical choice,” see, e.g., Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” especially Sartre’s discussion of a painter wondering “what painting ought he to make” and a student who came to ask Sartre’s advice about an ethical dilemma. 14 Aristotle’s arguments: See, e.g., The Nicomachean Ethics. 15 For a publicly traded company: Nobel Prize winner, and (says the Economist) “the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century,” Milton Friedman wrote a piece in the New York Times Magazine in 1970 titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.”


pages: 268 words: 109,447

The Cultural Logic of Computation by David Golumbia

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, American ideology, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, borderless world, business process, cellular automata, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, creative destruction, digital capitalism, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, finite state, folksonomy, future of work, Google Earth, Howard Zinn, IBM and the Holocaust, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, machine translation, means of production, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, web application, Yochai Benkler

Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Taylor, R. Gregory. 1998. Models of Computation and Formal Languages. New York: Oxford University Press. Trippi, Joe. 2004. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything. New York: Regan Books. Turing, Alan. 1936. “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Series 2, Volume 42 (1936–37), 230–265. ———. 1937. “Computability and λ-Definability.” The Journal of Symbolic Logic 2, 153–163. ———. 1950. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 59, Number 236 (October), 433–460.


The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do by Erik J. Larson

AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, Boeing 737 MAX, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Georg Cantor, Higgs boson, hive mind, ImageNet competition, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, retrograde motion, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yochai Benkler

Abduction in name only is not what I mean by abduction, and the systems using the name but not solving the prob­lem ­won’t help us make pro­g ress in AI. I ­w ill explain all this in pages to come. Chapter 1: The Intelligence Error 1. A. M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59, no. 236 (October 1950), 433–460. 2. A. M. Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, vols. 2–42, issue 1 (January 1937), 230–265. 3. A. M. Turing, Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals (PhD diss., Prince­ton University, 1938), 57. 284 N O T E S TO PA G E S 13 – 21 4. Gödel also showed that adding rules would patch up incompleteness in some systems, but that the new system, with the additional rules, would have yet other blind spots, on and on.


pages: 440 words: 109,150

The Secrets of Station X: How the Bletchley Park codebreakers helped win the war by Michael Smith

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Etonian, haute cuisine, QWERTY keyboard, trade route

Max Newman, one of the mathematicians working in the Testery, was a thin, bald academic from Manchester University, who like Tutte had worked in Tiltman’s research section. He had been Turing’s tutor at one stage. It was Newman’s suggestion that machines might be able to prove mathematical statements that had led Turing to write his ground-breaking paper ‘On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem’, and Newman who had ensured that it was published. Newman became convinced that, using similar principles to those advocated by Turing, it would be possible to build a machine that, once the patterns of the wheels had been worked out in the Testery, would find the settings of the first row of wheels, thereby making the codebreakers’ task immeasurably easier.


pages: 387 words: 111,096

Enigma by Robert Harris

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Columbine, index card, invention of the printing press, sensible shoes, Turing machine

The boxes she carried upstairs. One carton was full of books. A couple of Agatha Christies. A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics, two volumes, by a fellow named George Shoobridge Garr. Principia Mathematical, whatever that was. A pamphlet with a suspiciously Germanic ring to it—On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungs problem—inscribed 'To Tom, with fond respect, Alan'. More books full of mathematics, one so repeatedly read it was almost falling to pieces and stuffed full of markers—bus and tram tickets, a beer mat, even a blade of grass. It fell open at a heavily underlined passage: there is one purpose at any rate which the real mathematics may serve in war.


pages: 416 words: 112,268

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, ImageNet competition, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, luminiferous ether, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, OpenAI, openstreetmap, P = NP, paperclip maximiser, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, positional goods, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Thales of Miletus, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transport as a service, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, zero-sum game

Whether an object is a general-purpose computer has nothing to do with what it’s made of. 31. Turing’s breakthrough paper defined what is now known as the Turing machine, the basis for modern computer science. The Entscheidungsproblem, or decision problem, in the title is the problem of deciding entailment in first-order logic: Alan Turing, “On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 2nd ser., 42 (1936): 230–65. 32. A good survey of research on negative capacitance by one of its inventors: Sayeef Salahuddin, “Review of negative capacitance transistors,” in International Symposium on VLSI Technology, Systems and Application (IEEE Press, 2016). 33.


pages: 414 words: 109,622

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, DeepMind’s biggest supporters, announced they were retiring: Jack Nicas and Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Era Ends for Google as Founders Step Aside from a Pillar of Tech,” New York Times, December 3, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/technology/google-alphabet-ceo-larry-page-sundar-pichai.html. CHAPTER 21: X FACTOR “When I was an undergrad at King’s College Cambridge”: Geoff Hinton, tweet, March 27, 2019, https://twitter.com/geoffreyhinton/status/1110962177903640582?s=19. This was the paper that helped launch the computer age: A. M. Turing, “Article Navigation on Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, vol.s2-42, issue 1 (1937), pp. 230–265. built face recognition technology that could help track: Paul Mozur, “One Month, 500,000 Face Scans: How China Is Using AI to Profile a Minority,” New York Times, April 14, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/technology/china-surveillance-artificial-intelligence-racial-profiling.html.


pages: 412 words: 104,864

Silence on the Wire: A Field Guide to Passive Reconnaissance and Indirect Attacks by Michal Zalewski

active measures, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AltaVista, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, dark matter, data acquisition, Donald Knuth, fault tolerance, information security, MITM: man-in-the-middle, NP-complete, OSI model, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vannevar Bush

Bibliographic Notes Chapter 1 [41] [42] [43] [44] [45] [46] [47] [48] [49] [50] [51] Chapter 2 [52] [53] [54] [55] [56] Chapter 3 [57] [58] [59] Chapter 5 [60] [61] [62] [63] [64] [65] Chapter 6 [66] [67] Chapter 7 [68] [69] Chapter 8 [70] [71] [72] [73] Chapter 9 [74] [75] [76] [77] [78] [79] [80] [81] [82] [83] [84] [85] Chapter 10 [86] [87] [88] Chapter 11 [89] [90] [91] [92] [93] [94] [95] Chapter 13 [96] Chapter 14 [97] [98] [99] [100] [101] [102] [103] [104] [105] Chapter 15 [106] [107] Chapter 16 [108] [109] Chapter 17 [110] [111] [112] Chapter 18 [113] [114] [115] * * * [41] Alan Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Series 2, 42 (1936). [42] R.L. Rivest, A. Shamir, L. Adleman, “A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1978). [43] Ueli M. Maurer, “Fast Generation of Prime Numbers and Secure Public-Key Cryptographic Parameters,” Institute for Theoretical Computer Science, ETH Zurich, Switzerland (1994)


pages: 405 words: 105,395

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator by Keith Houston

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, classic study, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Grace Hopper, human-factors engineering, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, machine readable, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Neil Armstrong, off-by-one error, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert X Cringely, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Home Computer Revolution, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, V2 rocket, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

Arthur Tatnall and Christopher Leslie (Cham: Springer, 2016), 186–192. 6. the friden stw-10 1 Erwin Danneels, “Trying to Become a Different Type of Company: Dynamic Capability at Smith Corona,” Strategic Management Journal 32, no. 1 (January 1, 2011): 1–31, https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.863; “Company History” (Unisys), accessed May 28, 2021, https://www.unisys.com/aboutus/company-history; Frank Stephen Baldwin, “An Interview with the Father of the Calculating Machine” (Monroe Calculating Machine Company, 1919). 2 Martin, Kidwell, and Williams, The Calculating Machines, 23. 3 Robert Lewis, “Bletchley Park,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2016, https://www.britannica.com/place/Bletchley-Park; Andrew Hodges, “Turing, Alan Mathison (1912–1954), Mathematician and Computer Scientist,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/36578. 4 Alan M. Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society s2-42, no. 1 (1937): 230–265, https://doi.org/10.1112/plms/s2-42.1.230; Alan M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind LIX, no. 236 (1950): 433–460, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433. 5 Roland Pease, “Alan Turing: Inquest’s Suicide Verdict ‘Not Supportable,’ ” BBC News, June 26, 2012, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18561092; “Royal Pardon for Codebreaker Alan Turing,” BBC News, December 24, 2013, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25495315. 6 Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” 436–437. 7 Menninger, Number Words, 212, 306. 8 Heinrich Schreiber, Ayn New Kunstlich Buech, Welches Gar Gewiß Vnd Behend Lernet Nach Der Gemainen Regel Detre, Welschen Practic, Regeln Falsi vñ Etlichē Regeln Cosse Mancherlay Schöne Uñ Zu Wissen Notürfftig Rechnu~g Auff Kauffmanschafft . . .


pages: 463 words: 118,936

Darwin Among the Machines by George Dyson

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, British Empire, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, Donald Davies, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, IFF: identification friend or foe, independent contractor, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, launch on warning, low earth orbit, machine readable, Menlo Park, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, phenotype, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, spectrum auction, strong AI, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

CHAPTER 4 1.Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59 (October 1950): 443. 2.A. K. Dewdney, The Turing Omnibus (Rockville, Md.: Computer Science Press, 1989), 389. 3.Robin Gandy, “The Confluence of Ideas in 1936,” in Rolf Herken, ed., The Universal Turing Machine: A Half-century Survey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 85. 4.Alan Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 2d ser. 42 (1936–1937); reprinted, with corrections, in Martin Davis, ed., The Undecidable (Hewlett, N.Y.: Raven Press, 1965), 117. 5.Ibid., 136. 6.Kurt Gödel, 1946, “Remarks Before the Princeton Bicentennial Conference on Problems in Mathematics,” reprinted in Davis, The Undecidable, 84. 7.W.


pages: 481 words: 125,946

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence by John Brockman

Adam Curtis, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, bread and circuses, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, constrained optimization, corporate personhood, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, discrete time, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial engineering, Flash crash, friendly AI, functional fixedness, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information trail, Internet of things, invention of writing, iterative process, James Webb Space Telescope, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, loose coupling, machine translation, microbiome, mirror neurons, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Y2K

Chesterton, Heretics (New York: John Lane, 1905). 6. I. J. Good, “Speculation Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine,” Advances in Computers, vol. 6, 1965. 7. Kevin Kelly, “The Technium,” Edge, entry February 3, 2014, https://edge.org/conversation/the-technium [accessed July 21, 2015]. 8. Alan Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proc. Lond. Math. Soc. 42, series 2 (1936–7): 230–65. 9. Steven Pinker, comment on “The Myth of AI,” Edge, entry November 14, 2014, http://edge.org/conversation/the-myth-of-ai#25987 [accessed July 21, 2015]. 10. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 1 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978). 11.


Software Design for Flexibility by Chris Hanson, Gerald Sussman

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, connected car, domain-specific language, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, functional programming, Guido van Rossum, higher-order functions, interchangeable parts, loose coupling, Magellanic Cloud, phenotype, premature optimization, Richard Stallman, stem cell, the scientific method, Turing machine, type inference

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001/2014. [122]Gerald Jay Sussman and Jack Wisdom with Will Farr; Functional Differential Geometry. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. [123]The TTL Data Book for Design Engineers, by the Engineering Staff of Texas Instruments Incorporated, Semiconductor Group. [124]Alan M. Turing; “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” in Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society (Series 2), 42 (1936): 230–265. [125]David L. Waltz; Generating Semantic Descriptions From Drawings of Scenes With Shadows, PhD thesis, MIT, also Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Technical Report 271, November 1972. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/6911 [126]Stephen A.


The Science of Language by Noam Chomsky

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alfred Russel Wallace, backpropagation, British Empire, Brownian motion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, dark matter, Drosophila, epigenetics, finite state, Great Leap Forward, Howard Zinn, language acquisition, phenotype, public intellectual, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, theory of mind, trolley problem

Tomalin, Marcus (2003) “Goodman, Quine, and Chomsky: from a grammatical point of view.” Lingua 113: 1223–1253. Tomalin, Marcus (2006) Linguistics and the Formal Sciences: The Origins of Generative Grammar. Cambridge University Press. Tomalin, Marcus (2007) “Reconsidering Recursion in Linguistic Theory.” Lingua 117: 1784–1800. Turing, Alan (1937) “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” London Mathematical Society, Series 2 42: 230–265. Turing, Alan (1950) “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind 59: 433–460. Turing, Alan (1992) Collected Works of Alan Turing: Morphogenesis. Ed. P. T. Saunders. Amsterdam: North Holland. Tversky, Amos and Daniel Kahneman (1974) “Judgment under Uncertainty.”


pages: 759 words: 166,687

Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing Before Cybernetics by David A. Mindell

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computer Numeric Control, discrete time, Dr. Strangelove, Frederick Winslow Taylor, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Lewis Mumford, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Paul Samuelson, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, tacit knowledge, telerobotics, Turing machine

Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 24 (1876): 269–71. Tinus, W. C., and W. H. C. Higgins. “Early Fire-Control Radars for Naval Vessels.” Bell System Technical Journal 25 (January 1946): 1–47. Tomayko, James E. “Helmut Hoelzer’s Fully Electronic Analog Computer.” Annals of the History of Computing 7 (1985): 227–40. Turing, Alan. “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 2, no. 42 (1937): 230–65. U.S. Naval Academy. Fire Control Installations . United States Naval Academy, Postgraduate School, Pub. no. 105. Annapolis, Md., [ca. 1940]. ———. Notes on Fire Control . Washington, D.C.: U.S.


pages: 502 words: 132,062

Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence by James Bridle

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, experimental subject, factory automation, fake news, friendly AI, gig economy, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, impulse control, James Bridle, James Webb Space Telescope, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, language acquisition, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, music of the spheres, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, recommendation engine, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, speech recognition, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, techno-determinism, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, UNCLOS, undersea cable, urban planning, Von Neumann architecture, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

Palfreyman and M. al Khalil, ‘“A Funky Language for Teenzz to Use”: Representing Gulf Arabic in Instant Messaging’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 9(1), 2003, pp. 23–44. 42. Naomi S. Baron, ‘Why Email Looks Like Speech: Proofreading Pedagogy and Public Face’, in Jean Aitchison and Diana M. Lewis (eds), New Media Language (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 85–94. 6. NON-BINARY MACHINES 1. Plato, Apology, 21a–d. 2. A. M. Turing, ‘On Computable Numbers, With an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem’ (1936), Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Series 2, 42, 1937, pp. 230–65; DOI:10.1112/plms/s2-42.1.230. 3. A. M. Turing, ‘Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals’, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Series 2, 45, 1939, pp. 161–228. 4.


pages: 573 words: 157,767

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Daniel C. Dennett

Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Build a better mousetrap, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, deep learning, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fermat's Last Theorem, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, information retrieval, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John von Neumann, language acquisition, megaproject, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

A Natural History of Human Thinking. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Tononi G. 2008. “Consciousness as Integrated Information: A Provisional Manifesto.” Biological Bulletin 215 (3): 216–42. Trivers, Robert. 1985. Social Evolution. Menlo Park, Calif.: Benjamin/Cummings. Turing, Alan M. 1936. “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungs Problem.” Journal of Math 58 (345–363): 5. —. 1960. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind: 59: 433–460. von Neumann, John, and Oskar Morgenstern. 1953 (©1944). Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. von Uexküll, Jakob. 1934.


pages: 761 words: 231,902

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1910, 1912, 1913). 27. Gödel's incompleteness theorem first appeared in his "Uberformal unenscheiderbare Satze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I," Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 38 (1931): 173–98. 28. Alan M. Turing, "On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem," Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 42 (1936): 230-65. The "Entscheidungsproblem" is the decision or halting problem—that is, how to determine ahead of time whether an algorithm will halt (come to a decision) or continue in an infinite loop. 29.


The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apple II, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, functional programming, Gary Kildall, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Multics, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Soul of a New Machine, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture, Wiener process, zero-sum game

"A Perspective on SAGE: Discussion." Annals of the H15tory ofComputzng 5 (1983). -. "RelIabilIty of Components (Interview with Jay W. Forrester)." Annals of the H15tory ofComputzng 5 (1983). -. "Origin of the Term Bit." Annals of the History ofComputzng 6 (1984). Turing, Alan M. "On Computable Numbers, with an ApplIcation to the Entschldungsproblem." Pro- ceedzngs of the London Mathematical Soczety 2, no. 42 (1937). -. "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." Mind 59, no. 236 (1950). Reprinted In The Mznd's I: Fantaszes and ReflectIOns on Self & Soul, edited by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett.


pages: 1,351 words: 385,579

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

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