Intelligent Machinery
Turing's 1948 unpublished National Physical Laboratory report on machine intelligence
Tradition: Computer science / philosophy of mind / artificial intelligence
Turing's 1948 'Intelligent Machinery' — the earliest detailed AI research programme, including neural-network-like 'unorganised machines'
Composed in 1948 as an in-house report to the National Physical Laboratory (where Turing had moved from Bletchley Park to design and build the ACE — the Automatic Computing Engine, an early stored-program computer), 'Intelligent Machinery' was not published during Turing's lifetime: the NPL's director Sir Charles Darwin (grandson of the biologist) considered it 'a schoolboy essay' and filed it away. It was finally published in 1969 in B. Meltzer and D. Michie (eds.), 'Machine Intelligence 5' (Edinburgh University Press). The report is Turing's earliest detailed proposal for an artificial-intelligence research programme — eighteen months before his much-better-known 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' (Mind 59, 1950) where the Turing Test was proposed. 'Intelligent Machinery' covers: the abstract definition of machine intelligence; the distinction between learning by experience and learning by instruction; 'unorganised machines' (Turing's primitive form of neural network: a randomly-connected network of binary-threshold elements that could be trained by selective interference, anticipating both Hebbian learning and the modern perceptron); the use of search and game-playing (chess in particular) as testbeds; the role of training versus innate equipment; and the famous suggestion that a machine could be allowed to 'roam the countryside' as a way of acquiring rich experience. Many ideas later associated with the AI of the 1980s and 1990s (neural networks, reinforcement learning, embodied AI) appear here in nascent form. The report is a remarkable document of pre-symbolic AI thought; together with the 1950 Mind paper and the 1947 Lecture to the London Mathematical Society, it constitutes Turing's principal contribution to the philosophy of AI.
Author
Editions cited
- Intelligent Machinery, NPL Report (1948); first published in B. Meltzer and D. Michie (eds.), Machine Intelligence 5 (Edinburgh University Press, 1969)
- Reprinted in Alan Turing, Mechanical Intelligence: Collected Works of A. M. Turing, vol. 1, ed. D. C. Ince (Elsevier, 1992)
- Modern accessible edition: B. Jack Copeland (ed.), The Essential Turing (Oxford, 2004), pp. 411-432
- Commentary: Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983, ch. 7); Jack Copeland, Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age (Oxford, 2012)
School Embodiments
Extension of computability-theory into machine-learning territory.
"A machine which is to imitate a brain must be trained." (Intelligent Machinery, §3)
Earliest detailed Turing statement on machine intelligence.
"The human computer is the model for the abstract machine." (Intelligent Machinery, §2)
Founding statement of an AI research programme.
"Unorganised machines may be trained to perform definite tasks." (Intelligent Machinery, §6 — neural-network-like proposal)
Naturalistic continuum between brains and machines.
"The brain is essentially a complicated unorganised machine." (Intelligent Machinery, §3)
Structural account of intelligence as machine-implementable.
"Any sufficiently general structure can support intelligence." (Intelligent Machinery, §4)
Realism about machine intelligence as a genuine phenomenon.
"Whether machines can think is not a verbal question." (Intelligent Machinery, §1)
Analytic-philosophical tradition.
Internal Tensions
Earliest detailed proposal for an artificial-intelligence research programme — many ideas anticipating later neural-network and reinforcement-learning approaches. Sir Charles Darwin's dismissal of the report as 'a schoolboy essay' has become a standard example of administrative failure-of-imagination in the AI literature; its 1969 belated publication came too late to influence the field's early development.
I. Time
1948 composition; 1969 publication (21 years later). Turing was 36 at composition.
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II. Space
National Physical Laboratory (NPL), Teddington — Turing's institutional base 1945-48, between Bletchley Park and the move to Manchester.
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III. Matter
Single technical report (~30 pages). Form is technical-discursive rather than tightly mathematical; Turing was writing for an audience of NPL administrators.
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IV. Observer
Middle Turing. The observer is the cryptanalyst-turned-computer-designer working out the philosophical-technical foundations of artificial intelligence eighteen months before he would publish them more famously in Mind.
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V. Energy
Programmatic-AI energies. The report is the most concentrated single document of Turing's thinking about AI in the immediate post-war period.
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VI. Information
Single unpublished-then-published report. Its post-1969 reception has been substantial: many of its proposals (especially the 'unorganised machines' anticipating neural networks) were independently re-discovered by AI researchers who had not read Turing.
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Personas that cite this work
Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How Intelligent Machinery resolves each dilemma
34 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 6 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 23 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.