Assignment no 2

Topic
Turing Machine
Submitted to
Syed Hassan Zaidi
Submitted by
Muhammad Uzair (19851)
Iqra University Karachi
Dated: 4/4/2015

ALAN TURING
Alan Turing was a mathematician but he is philosopher as well. Alan Turing was born on June
23, 1912 in Maida Vale, London, United Kingdom. Alan Turing was a British pioneering
computer scientist. He was highly involved in computer science from where he gave the concept
of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of
a general purpose computer. Turing is known as father of theoretical computer science and
artificial intelligence. Alan Turing proposed an operational test of intelligence as a replacement
for the philosophical question, Can machines think?

IMITATION GAME
Turing is immortalized in the Turing Test for intelligence, which Turing himself called the
imitation game. He point that imitation game was only a part, was to argue that intelligence of a
human level could be evinced by a suitably programmed computer. The imitation game lent
definiteness to the idea of being as intelligent as a human being.

THE TURING MACHINE AND HIS TEST

The machine of Alan Turing measures the performance of an allegedly intelligent machine
against that of a human being, arguably the best and only standard for intelligent behavior.... The
Turing test, in spite of its intuitive appeal, is vulnerable to a number of justifiable criticisms. One
of the most important of these is aimed at its bias toward purely symbolic problem-solving tasks.
It does not test abilities requiring perceptual skill or manual dexterity, even though these are
important components of human intelligence. Conversely, it is sometimes suggested that the
Turing test needlessly constrains machine intelligence to fit a human mold. Perhaps machine
intelligence is simply different from human intelligence and trying to evaluate it in human terms
is a fundamental mistake. Do we really wish a machine would do mathematics as slowly and
inaccurately as a human? In short Turing test is a test of machine ability to exhibit intelligent
behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. The test was introduced by
Turing in the paper he wrote computing machinery and intelligence which open with the
words: I propose to consider the question, can machine think? Because thinking is difficult to
define, Turing chooses to replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is
expressed in relatively unambiguous words. Turing new question is: Are there imaginable
digital computers which would do well in the imitation game? This question, Turing believed, is
one that can actually be answered. In the remainder of the paper, he argued against the major
objection to the proposition that machines can think.

SUMMARY
Alan Turing made history. His breaking of the German U-boat Enigma cipher in World War II
ensured Allied-American control of the Atlantic. But Turing vision went far beyond the desperate
wartime struggle. Already in 1930s he had defined the concept of the universal machine, which
underpins the computer revolution. But Turing true goal was the scientific understanding of the
mind that comes in term of Turing Machine. Alan Turing invented a machine to break the
enigma. He invented that machine because they cannot do the work manually because they have
lot of information so he invented the machine which he calls it Christopher. Christopher was
his school friend which was died because of some sort of disease Christopher is only his friend at
that time that is why he gave this name to the machine. Basically he invented the machine to
break the code and to win the war against the German to found what sort of messages they are
conveying in World War II. After a year of government-mandated hormonal therapy, Alan Turing
committed suicide on June 7th, 1954. He was 41 years old. Alan Turing was a homosexual.
Between 1885 and 1967, approximately 49000 homosexual men were convicted of cross
indecency under British Law. In 2013, Queen Elizabeth II granted Turing a posthumous royal
pardon, honoring his unprecedented achievements. Historians estimate that breaking enigma
shortened the war by more than two years, saving over 14 million lives. The project of Turing
remained a government-held secret for more than 50 years. Turing work inspired generations of
research into what scientists called Turing Machines. Today we call them computers. There is
also a movie on Alan Turing and his achievement and work named The Imitation Game.
Alan Turing: The Enigma: The book that inspired the film The Imitation Game

CAN MACHINE THINK OR NOT

Machine cant think as people do. Machine is different for the person so they think differently. I
have read the information related to the topic and what I think that or in my opinion machine
cannot think as the humans do but the information of the human can be evicted in machine
because after the death of human the knowledge would also gone but the information of the
human mind can be saved in machine or can be used for the later usage.

References:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/150731.Alan_Turing#
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9779.html
http://aitopics.org/topic/turing-test
http://www.turing.org.uk/scrapbook/test.html