Homework 3

Alan Turing's famous paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" appeared in 1950. That was many years before the birth of Computer Science, so it was published in a journal on psychology and philosophy. Remember that the intended readers had no references to digital computers, so it is much easier for you to follow Turing's line of reasoning.

http://www.csee.umbc.edu/courses/471/papers/turing.pdf
http://phil415.pbworks.com/f/TuringComputing.pdf (Facsimile version)

You may skip sections 3 and 4 (too easy for you) and everything from "(7) Argument from Continuity" to the end (obsolete).

Please write down your comments on the following questions, post them in KTH Social, and bring a print-out to the seminar.

1. There are now many apps that can play the Imitation Game with some success. Propose a question that you think will differentiate the app from a human answerer.

2. Section 5 concerns the universality of digital computers. Can a universal computer exist? Laplace viewed the universe as a machine; might the universe be emulated on a universal computer?

3. Section 6 lists objections to "a machine can think". The mathematical objection is the deepest one. Try to formulate it concisely and clearly.

4. The conciousness objection is the strongest one. Turing call its extreme version "solipsism". What does he mean?

The first link points to a 404 error on UMBC's web site, at least from outside of KTH's network. However, the second link works fine, so the paper is still easily reachable.

The first link contains some invalid characters at the end of it, if you remove them, it works:

> http://www.csee.umbc.edu/courses/471/papers/turing.pdf

I believe the deadline on the "Assignments" > "Homework 3" page is incorrect. It says that the deadline is the 7th of October, when the correct date according to the "Seminars" page is the 30th of September.