May 23, 2018 Wednesday
Bedtime Story
Alan Turing had Definitely Read Luigi Menabrea and Ada Lovelace
The work of both Ada Lovelace and Charles
Babbage was rediscovered when the world caught up with their ideas and when
programming came to be better understood in 1940s.
It was a British scientist by the name of
Bertram Bowden who later went on to become Minister of Science and Education (alas
what a rarity for a scientist to enter mainstream politics and then continuing
to be a rational and scientific man!) who while collecting material for his
1953 book ‘Faster than Thought: A Symposium on digital Computing Machines’ came
to meet Ada’s granddaughter.
This lovely young lady was very generous
and supplied Bowden all the papers that she possessed of her enchanting
grandmother.
Thus began the gradual revival of a lost
generation of geniuses that would almost certainly not have found any place in
my bedtime story had it been not for Bertram Bowden.
One person who certainly did not miss out
on Ada Lovelace and her work was the great Alan Turing who in his 1950 paper
titled ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ coined the phrase ‘Lady
Lovelace’s Objection’ quoting the following lines of hers in his paper:
“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions
to originate anything.
It can do whatever we know how to order it
to perform.”
These two statements are the first two
sentences of the second paragraph of the Note G which certifies that Turing
would certainly have read the masterpiece of both Luigi Menabrea followed by
all the Notes of Lovelace from A through G.
In this paper Turing essentially deals with
the problem of intelligence of computing machines and poses the question at the
very beginning: ‘Can machines think?’
In the paper he plays the devil’s advocate (this
is so because I am acutely aware of his views on both machines and human apes)
lists out the following nine arguments why it can be objected to ever
considering computing machines as to be thinking devices:
(1) The Theological Objection
(2) The ‘Heads in the Sand’ Objection
(3) The Mathematical Objection
(4) The Argument from Consciousness
(5) Arguments from Various Disabilities
(6) Lady Lovelace’s Objection
(7) Argument from Continuity in the Nervous
System
(8) The Argument from Informality of
Behavior
(9)
The Argument from Extra-Sensory Perception
It is a beautiful non-mathematical paper (I
promise you, not a single equation, though at one point it just has two grids
of numbers that are more in the line of logic gates than mathematical digits)
that displays in full glory almost a clairvoyance-like thought processes that
this mathematical logician had.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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