Can Automatic Calculating Machines Be Said To Think? (1952)

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Turing ◽  
Richard Braithwaite
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Turing Test ◽  
Machine Intelligence ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Considerable Proportion ◽  
Computing Machinery ◽  
Main Work ◽  
University Of Cambridge ◽  
Games Theory ◽  
The University

This discussion between Turing, Newman, R. B. Braithwaite, and G. Jefferson was recorded by the BBC on 10 January 1952 and broadcast on BBC Radio on the 14th, and again on the 23rd, of that month. This is the earliest known recorded discussion of artificial intelligence. The anchor man of the discussion is Richard Braithwaite (1900–90). Braithwaite was at the time Sidgwick Lecturer in Moral Science at the University of Cambridge, where the following year he was appointed Knightsbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy. Like Turing, he was a Fellow of King’s College. Braithwaite’s main work lay in the philosophy of science and in decision and games theory (which he applied in moral philosophy). Geoffrey Jefferson (1886–1961) retired from the Chair of Neurosurgery at Manchester University in 1951. In his Lister Oration, delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons of England on 9 June 1949, he had declared: ‘When we hear it said that wireless valves think, we may despair of language.’ Turing gave a substantial discussion of Jefferson’s views in ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ (pp. 451–2), rebutting the ‘argument from consciousness’ that he found in the Lister Oration. In the present chapter, Jefferson takes numerous pot shots at the notion of a machine thinking, which for the most part Turing and Newman are easily able to turn aside. Jefferson may have thought little of the idea of machine intelligence, but he held Turing in considerable regard, saying after Turing’s death that he ‘had real genius, it shone from him’. From the point of view of Turing scholarship, the most important parts of ‘Can Automatic Calculating Machines Be Said to Think’ are the passages containing Turing’s exposition of the imitation game or Turing test. The description of the test that Turing gave in ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ is here modified in a number of significant ways. The lone interrogator of the original version is replaced by a ‘jury’ (p. 495). Each jury must judge ‘quite a number of times’ and ‘sometimes they really are dealing with a man and not a machine’. For a machine to pass the test, a ‘considerable proportion’ of the jury ‘must be taken in by the pretence’.

The Heroine, the Harpy, and the Human Being

1993 ◽  
Vol 9 (34) ◽  
pp. 110-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harriet Walter
Keyword(s):  
Present Form ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Women's Roles ◽  
Open University ◽  
Human Being ◽  
University Of Cambridge ◽  
Art Works ◽  
Women’S Roles ◽  
The University ◽  
Radio Programme

An earlier version of this paper was written by Harriet Walter in December 1991 for the second Divina Conference in Torino, in response to an invitation to speak from the actress's point of view about playing Shakespeare's women. In the event, she ranged much more widely across the typology of women's roles in the theatre, and the actress's response to their challenges – and limitations. The paper has since been delivered, in roughly the present form at the University of Cambridge Graduate Drama Seminar in February 1992, and in March 1992 was read in extract and discussed on a BBC Radio programme in the Art Works Series for the Open University. Opposite, Lizbeth Goodman sets the paper in the context of Harriet Walter's theatrical career.

scholarly journals Some Aspects of Meningococcal Virulence: A Report to The Medical Research Council on Work Carried Out at the University of Cambridge Field Laboratories

1923 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. G. D. Murray
Keyword(s):  
Medical Research ◽  
Research Council ◽  
Medical Research Council ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Common Basis ◽  
University Of Cambridge ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The University

“Virulence” is an ill-defined term and its use frequently gives rise to disputes, which remain unresolved because the disputants have no common basis other than that the term applies to organisms which cause disease. Thus it is imperative that the writer clearly defines the meaning of the term virulence as used in this paper, that the issue may not be confused by the reader approaching the subject from a different point of view.

I. The Disputed Election of Hugh Balsham, Bishop of Ely

1949 ◽  
Vol 9 (03) ◽  
pp. 259-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Ullmann
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
The Real ◽  
University Of Cambridge ◽  
The University

Hugh Balsham, bishop of Ely from 1257 to 1286, is chiefly remembered for his services to the university of Cambridge and for his foundation of Peterhouse. His election to the see of Ely, and the subsequent dispute arising out of it, has hitherto received but scanty attention, and the treatment that this incident was afforded has usually been based on the account given by Matthew Paris. But Matthew Paris's highly romantic and colourful account is not at all accurate, nor, from a canonist's point of view, does his report make intelligible reading; it is the somewhat sensational presentation of one who relied on the necessarily somewhat distorted tales of more or less well-informed reporters. Being apparently the only contemporary source, it has served so far as the sole record of this dispute. But newly discovered material enables us to reconstruct the dispute following the election and, above all, to show the real reasons which provoked it. Although by no means aspiring to the striking publicity of the Canterbury election some fifty years earlier, this incident, in several respects, is more important than its renowned predecessor. Before we attempt to reconstruct the arguments, it will be advisable to summarize briefly the report of Matthew Paris.

Environmental cell studies of deformation and fracture

1990 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 516-517
Author(s):  
H. K. Birnbaum ◽  
I. M. Robertson
Keyword(s):  
National Laboratory ◽  
Argonne National Laboratory ◽  
Damage Threshold ◽  
Chromatic Aberration ◽  
Good Choice ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Deformation And Fracture ◽  
Environmental Cell ◽  
Gas Molecules ◽  
The University

Studies of the effects of hydrogen environments on the deformation and fracture of fcc, bcc and hep metals and alloys have been carried out in a TEM environmental cell. The initial experiments were performed in the environmental cell of the HVEM facility at Argonne National Laboratory. More recently, a dedicated environmental cell facility has been constructed at the University of Illinois using a JEOL 4000EX and has been used for these studies. In the present paper we will describe the general design features of the JEOL environmental cell and some of the observations we have made on hydrogen effects on deformation and fracture.The JEOL environmental cell is designed to operate at 400 keV and below; in part because of the available accelerating voltage of the microscope and in part because the damage threshold of most materials is below 400 keV. The gas pressure at which chromatic aberration due to electron scattering from the gas molecules becomes excessive does not increase rapidly with with accelerating voltage making 400 keV a good choice from that point of view as well. A series of apertures were placed above and below the cell to control the pressures in various parts of the column.

Adam Zalužanský’s “De sexu plantarum” (1592): an early pioneering chapter on plant sexuality

2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Funk
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Translation ◽  
History Of Botany ◽  
Main Work ◽  
Botanical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
First Time

In the history of botany, Adam Zalužanský (d. 1613), a Bohemian physician, apothecary, botanist and professor at the University of Prague, is a little-known personality. Linnaeus's first biographers, for example, only knew Zalužanský from hearsay and suspected he was a native of Poland. This ignorance still pervades botanical history. Zalužanský is mentioned only peripherally or not at all. As late as the nineteenth century, a researcher would be unaware that Zalužanský’s main work Methodi herbariae libri tres actually existed in two editions from two different publishers (1592, Prague; 1604, Frankfurt). This paper introduces the life and work of Zalužanský. Special attention is paid to the chapter “De sexu plantarum” of Zalužanský’s Methodus, in which, more than one hundred years before the well-known De sexu plantarum epistola of R. J. Camerarius, the sexuality of plants is suggested. Additionally, for the first time, an English translation of Zalužanský’s chapter on plant sexuality is provided.

Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Civil Society

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Smith
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The University

Adam Ferguson was a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and a leading member of the Scottish Enlightenment. A friend of David Hume and Adam Smith, Ferguson was among the leading exponents of the Scottish Enlightenment’s attempts to develop a science of man and was among the first in the English speaking world to make use of the terms civilization, civil society, and political science. This book challenges many of the prevailing assumptions about Ferguson’s thinking. It explores how Ferguson sought to create a methodology for moral science that combined empirically based social theory with normative moralising with a view to supporting the virtuous education of the British elite. The Ferguson that emerges is far from the stereotyped image of a nostalgic republican sceptical about modernity, and instead is one much closer to the mainstream Scottish Enlightenment’s defence of eighteenth century British commercial society.

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