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Lot 177

TURING, ALAN MATHISON. 1912-1954.
"Computing Machinery and Intelligence." Pp 433-460 IN: Mind. Edinburgh: October, 1950. Vol 59, no 236.

4 June 2014, 13:00 EDT
New York

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TURING, ALAN MATHISON. 1912-1954.

"Computing Machinery and Intelligence." Pp 433-460 IN: Mind. Edinburgh: October, 1950. Vol 59, no 236.
8vo. Original printed gray wrappers. Minor chipping to edges of wrappers, backstrip unobtrusively repaired.

TURING'S IMPORTANT PAPER OPENING THE FIELD OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. Turing begins by demurring at the question "Can machines think?" and setting out in its stead an "imitation game," that we now know as the "Turing Test." In this game, a human judge engaging in (mediated) conversation must determine whether he is conversing with a human or a machine designed to imitate human conversation. Turing set out his own view that "in about fifty years' time it will be possible, to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about [10 billion bits], to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning ... I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted."
Whether or not Turing's prediction about "general educated opinion" at the beginning of the 21st century has proven correct, his paper was a guiding one for the field of artificial intelligence. It turned attention away from the biological and philosophical aspects of the question and towards the concrete challenge of programming for increasingly nuanced and complicated tasks.

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