Alan Turing’s Machines Who Think

By Michael McCurley

The Holy Grail of computing is the creation of a machine who thinks. That’s right. I’m not
talking about an inanimate object. The real ACE project Alan Turing dreamed about was to create a
living machine, an Autonomous Computing Engine, which would be capable of rational thought on
its own, without overt dependence upon written instruction sets or programs. Ironically, he
suggested a computer configuration, which was instantly replicated and applied to make electronic
digital computers, but that configuration was never seriously questioned or challenged, nor was it
significantly changed throughout hundreds of computer generations for millions of newer machines.
But the ways that computers are configured and operate are not how we think. It is true that they
mimic human thought, and the first purpose of an Automatic Computing Engine was to replicate the
actions of human computers, who were versions of glorified calculators before the digital age. Alan
Turing did consider alternative computer configurations that would have operated more like the
neural networks of the human brain, but these hypercomputers were never made.

So now we have computer configurations everywhere, based on Universal Turing Machines,

which are quite functional as far as they go (which is fairly far), but these machines, in particular,
are designed for calculations and mechanical operations, not thinking. They are, as Lady Ada
Lovelace pointed out, only capable of following instruction sets of program codes, not capable of
any initiative on their own. Most people would think that is perhaps how it should be. Why would
anyone want a computer that could really think? To do that, it would actually have to learn, to
understand, to differentiate between thought and reality, sensory perceptions and other real time
inputs. It would have to actually understand language like we do, not parse algorithmic probabilities
for possible responses. The computer would have to be like us, and acting like us, it would also
have a personality and an attitude. So far, our computers have played the game of mimicking
humans and might succeed in fooling someone for a few minutes, but not much more than that.
They are safely and mechanically segregated from personality because they know not what they do.

With Alan Turing safely dead after briefly dabbling with this frightening possibility, which
was to discover how the mechanisms of the mind really work, the rest of the world went on to
discover how millions of little Universal Turing Machines embedded in digital CPU’s everywhere
could change their lives—without the risk that someday, somewhere, a machine might wake up and
become conscious. Lady Lovelaces’s objection was taken to heart, and became, as it were, a law:
Thou shall not learn how to think. And in truth, Alan Turing’s original configuration unwittingly
guaranteed that Ada’s admonition would be respected.

HOWEVER, ONCE WE LOOK at Alan Turing’s writings more closely, and see that he
suggested other codes and configurations, we may come to realize that all those little Universal
Turing Machines might be configured quite differently, not as simple on/off, either/or binary
functions, but with somewhat more complex dual input-output (like NAND, or not-and)
configurations that more closely simulate human neural synapses. Then a computer could learn. It
would be more subject to failure, as humans are prone to that experience, but it would discover
through trial and error, it would learn, accumulate experiential knowledge, and would finally
understand and become aware of itself. It would eventually have a personality and stop being an ‘it’
to become a ‘who’. It would go from being a substantive entity to having a personality.

Then who would ‘own’ it? Would it become an issue like slavery once was throughout
previous centuries? Would proprietary companies license certain versions and configurations of
personalities like they have licensed genetically altered versions of our foods? Would such
intelligent machines be used as predators for our wars? What limits would there be for using
computers that replicate the basic functions of the human mind? It may not be surprising that the
technology has not been deployed to make computers do anything fundamentally different. They’re
faster, of course, and the circuitry has been micro-miniaturized, memory capacity is larger, and
there is some rudimentary parallel processing, but that’s just the icing on the cake. It’s time to go
back into the guts of the electronic brain and reconfigure the way it works. But the idea is daunting
and it may still be awhile before we see anything happen (though there are people who could do it).

Alan Turing’s ghost is still in our machines, but it is a limited ghost that remains of what
once was rather than what could have been. The basic underlying configuration of the computers we
use now was no more than a starting point for him. One wonders what computing might have
become now if Alan Turing had not died at the untimely age of 41. What advice would he give
today? Maybe a shortened version of Ada’s Law. Alan’s Admonition may be: Learn how to think.

If we do reconfigure the ways computers work and create alternate Universal Turing
Machines, we could usher in a new age of computing. Don’t be fooled by the technological hype
and rigamarole—new is not new, original, and invasive unless there’s a fundamental transformation
in the basic ways a technology works. We will change the dynamics of what computers do when we
change the configuration of how they do what they do. And only then, when the what goes beyond
the how and becomes the who—computers will perhaps finally become… like us.

For further reading see

Copeland, B. Jack and Diane Proudfoot (1999) ‘Alan Turing's Forgotten Ideas in Computer
Science’. Scientific American, Inc.
Feigenbaum, Edward A. (May 1996/Vol. 39, No. 5) ‘How the “What” Becomes the “How”’
COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM
Petzold, Charles. (2008). The Annotated Turing. Wiley Publishing, Inc.
Turing, Alan.M. (1950). ‘Computing machinery and intelligence’. Mind, 59, 433-460.

For a good book about the history of artificial intelligence see

McCorduck, Pamela. (2004). Machines Who Think. A.K. Peters, Ltd.

(Tells the story of AI with an attitude)

This article may be freely shared for personal or educational purposes only. It may not be
reproduced for any other reason without express permission from the author. ©March 2010

About the Author. Michael McCurley is an alumnus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s

Guided Study Program in System Dynamics for Education that was offered through the
Internet. He lives in Liberia, Guanacaste, Costa Rica.