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'The Imitation Game' puts the spotlight on Alan Turing and his groundbreaking machine
It is the height of the Second World War. A group of codebreakers stands in a dimly lit warehouse 50 miles northwest of London, a giant machine composed of spinning drums and wires looms in front of them. It's taken years of work -- as well as a few shouting matches -- to get the device assembled and ready to start sorting through 159 quintillion combinations in search of the one that will let the British crack the Germans' infamous Enigma machine. The switch is flipped and nine rows of drums begin spinning as the assembled group waits... and waits. It takes a while to go through each combination, and staring at the device has all the excitement of watching laundry spin in a dryer. Frustration quickly sets in and tensions mount, because for the team in The Imitation Game, guns and tanks are not the weapons they fear. Their enemy is time.
Supercomputer passes the Turing test by mimicking a teenager (update: reasons to be cautious)
After 64 long years, it looks like a machine has finally passed the Turing test for artificial intelligence. A supercomputer in a chat-based challenge fooled 33 percent of judges into thinking that it was Eugene Goostman, a fictional 13 year old boy; that's just above the commonly accepted Turing test's 30 percent threshold. Developers Vladimir Veselov and Eugene Demchenko say that the key ingredients were both a plausible personality (a teen who thinks he knows more than he does) and a dialog system adept at handling more than direct questions.
Chess and the Automaton Endgame
Welcome to Time Machines, where we offer up a selection of mechanical oddities, milestone gadgets and unique inventions to test out your tech-history skills. Machines may need to start a union. After all, various deep thinkers have been busy for more than a century dreaming up ways to impart human-like thought processes and capabilities into them, just so they can do more of our work. Familiar names in the annals of computing's history such as Charles Babbage and Alan Turing may stand out, but wedged between those figures on the historical timeline is the perhaps lesser-known Spanish inventor and engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo. Of his many inventions, one of the most unique is "El Ajedrecista" (The Chess Player), which he presented to the Parisian public in 1914. It was a chess-playing automaton, programmed to stand against a human opponent and respond accordingly to any move they made. It knew if someone was trying to cheat, and took pride in moving its own playing pieces around the board. Most of all, it reveled in announcing a victory against its human taskmasters when it inevitably won the game.
UK pardons computing pioneer Alan Turing
Campaigners have spent years demanding that the UK exonerate computing legend Alan Turing, and they're finally getting their wish. Queen Elizabeth II has just used her royal prerogative to pardon Turing, 61 years after an indecency conviction that many now see as unjust. The criminal charge shouldn't overshadow Turing's vital cryptoanalysis work during World War II, Justice Secretary Chris Grayling said when explaining the move. The pardon is a purely symbolic gesture, but an important one all the same -- it acknowledges that the conviction cut short the career of a man who defended his country, broke ground in artificial intelligence and formalized computing concepts like algorithms.
UK government receptive to bill that would pardon Alan Turing
Many in the UK recognize Alan Turing's contributions to computing as we know it, but attempts to obtain a pardon for the conviction that tragically cut short his career have thus far been unsuccessful. There's a new glimmer of hope, however: government whip Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon says that the current leadership has "great sympathy" for a bill that would pardon Turing. As long as no one calls for amendments, the legislation should clear Parliament's House of Lords by late October and reach the House of Commons soon afterward. While there's no guarantee that the measure will ultimately pass, the rare level of endorsement suggests that Turing's name could soon be cleared.
Google's Turing doodle celebrates his genius, reminds us how dumb we are (video)
This week sees many corners of the globe celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing. A man whose contribution to the worlds of tech and gadgets is immeasurable -- a sentiment not lost on Google. Today, geeks and norms worldwide will be waking up to possibly the most complex doodle to date. Can you set the machine and spell out "Google"? If you can, you'll be sent off to lots more information about the man himself. This isn't the only thing Mountain View's done to keep his legacy alive, having previously helped Bletchley Park raise funds to purchase (and display) Turing's papers, and more recently helping curators at London's Science Museum with its Codebreaker - Alan Turing's Life and Legacy exhibition. If you haven't already, head to Google.com and pop your logic hat on, and if you get stuck, head past the break for a helpful video.
Remembering Alan Turing at 100
Alan Turing would have turned 100 this week, an event that would have, no doubt, been greeted with all manner of pomp -- the centennial of a man whose mid-century concepts would set the stage for modern computing. Turing, of course, never made it that far, found dead at age 41 from cyanide poisoning, possibly self-inflicted. His story is that of a brilliant mind cut down in its prime for sad and ultimately baffling reasons, a man who accomplished so much in a short time and almost certainly would have had far more to give, if not for a society that couldn't accept him for who he was. The London-born computing pioneer's name is probably most immediately recognized in the form of the Turing Machine, the "automatic machine" he discussed in a 1936 paper and formally extrapolated over the years. The concept would help lay the foundation for future computer science, arguing that a simple machine, given enough tape (or, perhaps more appropriately in the modern sense, storage) could be used to solve complex equations. All that was needed as Turing laid it out, was a writing method, a way of manipulating what's written and a really long ream to write on. In order to increase the complexity, only the storage, not the machine, needs upgrading.
IBM celebrates the 15th anniversary of Deep Blue beating Garry Kasparov (video)
It's been 15 years since IBM's Deep Blue recorded its famous May 11th 1997 victory over world champion chess player Garry Kasparov -- a landmark in artificial intelligence. Designed by Big Blue as a way of understanding high-power parallel processing, the "brute force" system could examine 200 million chess positions every second, beating the grandmaster 3.5-2.5 after losing 4-2 the previous year. It went on to help develop drug treatments, analyze risk and aid data miners before being replaced with Blue Gene and, more recently, Watson -- which recorded a famous series of victories on Jeopardy! in 2011. If you'd like to know more, we've got a video with one of the computer's fathers: Dr. Murray Campbell and a comparison on how the three supercomputers stack up after the break. As for Garry Kasparov? The loss didn't ruin his career, he went on to win every single Chess trophy conceived, retired, wrote some books and went into politics. As you do.
Google reCAPTCHAs now featuring Street View addresses, 221b Baker St. to get even more famous
If you've enjoyed decrypting the often frustratingly skewed (and occasionally humorously juxtaposed) reCAPTCHAs, you might be a bit sad to learn that Google is mixing things up with some rather more boring numerals. The combinations of two words are typically used as part of a registration form to ensure the registrant is, indeed, human. Google is now replacing one of the words in some of its reCAPTCHA forms with photos gleaned from Street View service. Google says it uses these numbers internally to improve the accuracy of Street View and that pulling them into reCAPTCHAs is part of an "experiment" to "determine if using imagery might also be an effective way to further refine our tools for fighting machine and bot-related abuse online."In other words, Google's bots are already capable of decoding these numbers, which makes this all sound like a bit of a challenge to the rest of the OCR-loving coders in the world. Any takers?[Image Credit: dirtbag]
Turing machine built from wood, scrap metal and magnets, 'geek' achievement unlocked (video)
We take it for granted nowadays that thumbnail-sized silicon chips can crunch through the most complex of calculations, but early last century, mathematical tasks were still being carried out by humans. It was around that time that one Alan Turing, Enigma code breaker and general computer science pioneer, came up with what was essentially a thought experiment, a mechanical machine capable of simulating and solving algorithms just like a grown-up CPU. Well, you know where this is going by now, one British software engineer decided to build just such a device, out of old bits and bobs he had lying around his geek lair, producing a working model that was recently shown off at the Maker Faire UK in Newcastle. The only downer, as he points out, is that it'd take "months to add two numbers together," but all good things start off humbly. Video after the break.
Computing pioneer Chuck Thacker wins Turing Award
Chuck Thacker may not be quite the same household name as some other computing pioneers, but it's pretty hard to overstate the influence he's had on the industry, a feat for which he's now be honored with the A.M. Turing Award -- widely considered to be the "Nobel prize of computing." While Thacker is now a "Technical Fellow" at Microsoft, he first made a name for himself at Xerox PARC, where he not only helped design and realize the very first modern computer, the Alto, but co-invented Ethernet, and contributed to a range of other projects that have had a lasting impact on computing to this day. Later, while at Microsoft Reseach, Thacker oversaw the design of the very first Tablet PC prototypes, and he continues to lead up a computer-architecture group at the company and be involved with various research efforts. Of course, that's only scratching the surface -- hit up the links below for a more complete background of the man's work, and head on past the break for a short video put together for the occasion by Microsoft.
Military Turing test to make autonomous war robots legal?
Not that we're experts on the matter or anything, but if barrister and engineer Chris Elliot knows a thing or two about legal issues, a kind of "military Turing test" could be the key to legally deploying autonomous systems in battle. As it stands, "weapons intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between civilian and military targets are illegal" -- at least according to Mr. Elliot -- but by testing an intelligent war machine's ability to hone in on legitimate targets and brush off friendlies, all that could change. Of course, actually administering the test still remains a mystery, but considering that remotely controlled armed bots are currently being used in Iraq, we reckon someone's already figuring out a solution to said dilemma.
