Response to Turing

I read a bit of Turing for an Art History paper I wrote last Spring, and many of the ideas that he presents in this article are similar to those I came across in my research. For instance, at the end of the article in discussing the computer as a child who can learn to play the Imitation Game effectively via various methods, Turing discusses the way that the human learning process has to be broken down into its component parts in order to transfer this process to a machine. This is the same task that the artist I was writing about, Harold Cohen, used to make a computer that could independently draw pictures. Cohen started out the program for this computer by loking at cave paintings and thinking about the basic elements of drawing: basic forms that could signify something to an observer. Turing claims that a basic form that a computer who needed to be able to verbally communicate would have to know is a system of logic.

It was also interesting to me how much the article got into th practical considerations of hardware (the discussion of legs, eyes, etc) because I would think that a programmer would be much more interested in the internal parts of a computer (the brain, so to speak) than the external parts. Of course, the external parts can provide data that can be analyzed by the internal parts, and I do admit that both internal and external must be designed with the other in mind, but I would not have anticipatd the concern for these elements. I also was surprised by the way Turing treated the ESP argument, and the fact that he actually gave it some validity. The style of the whole rest of the pice was so cold and calculated and scientific that when he spoke of how serious a problem ESP could be in the acceptance of the Interrogation Game, it seemed kind of funny.

I also think that this article shows its age in some of its objections, and in Turrings constant references to storage space. As far as I know, a lot of the ideas that he brought up in the article are no longer issues because computers today are so fast and so small. Interestingly, I think many people today would probably say that they don't think a computer can win the Interrogation Game. I would guess that this opinion is based on their everyday contact with computers that are not designed to win this game, and if there were linguistically gifted computers in our everyday lives, I'm certain that everyone would be more likely to think that computer thought was happening all the time.