The Amazing Alan Turing

When I first heard that 2012 marks 100 years since the birth of Alan Turing and that Manchester, my home since 2010, would be host to many of the events to mark his centenary, I pulled out my old drafts of The Turing Horse and thought it would be an appropriate and serendipitous time to bring new life to the story.  How the hypermedia story finally got that new life is told in the TweetFiction Experience, but what's really struck me now are the insights from the first of the public lectures I was able to attend for the Alan Turing 100.  I barely made it to Andrew Hodges lecture on Alan Turing's life and was dumbfounded to learn just how absolutely amazing Alan Turing was and that much of his work was done here in Manchester.

Andrew Hodges showed us how Alan Turing was not your run of the mill mathematician, interested only in abstract theories, he had a passion for applying the theories to the real world and lived the bridging of the gap between theory and application.  He not only conceived how a method (rule, algorithm, or procedure) could be represented with numbers and thus mathematically, he applied the representation to the concept of a machine capable of processing such rules and instructions (read programs), to process the numerically encoded instructions and solve any number of problems. He then extrapolated on the possibility of a machine intelligence and devised the Turing Test, a concept for testing for the presence of artificial intelligence.  While the first computers and their programs were machines with the encoding of the instructions physically built as part of the contraption, he conceived of The Universal Machine which separated the processing or computing from the instructions or programming, thus you did not need to build a new machine for each new problem.

I cannot wait to incorporate the insights gained from this lecture into The Turing Horse; it raised so many questions!  How would the foundations leading to computing and Machine Intelligence have evolved on the other worlds they encountered?  Can I extrapolate a plausible set of AI Epiphanies from the other worlds?  What would the impacts of their findings be on the AI Facade?  Would they have their own theories on how machine intelligence evolves and would that change their approach to preserving biological intelligence?

I'm hoping to learn more at the other events in Manchester marking 100 years since the birth of the amazing Alan Turing; stay tuned!!!