The Turing Elves Put On Radiohead Masks

Days to Centenary: 214

Turing Elves — to whom I have referred several times on this blog — are those often invisible but near-ubiquitous souls who have no official standing vis a vis Alan Turing, but who nonetheless mount performances, create objects d’art, and otherwise do deeds that honour, commemorate, or even parody the man, his work, and his legacy.  (“Elves” because, like Santa’s Elves, they work unseen offstage and then suddenly brighten everyone’s day by delivering their gifts to the world.)

My hat is off to the Turing Centenary Advisory Committee and all the other official Turing Year folks, who are doing an amazing job — I don’t want to detract in any way from what they’re doing, just to add to it.

The Turing Elves are the DIYers, guerilla theatre artists, and flash mob ghosts of the Turing legacy.  Out of sheer geek love, with a rampant sense of fun and often without even attribution, they enhance the world, each in their own, individual way.

They are people like:

• Posterchild, who decorated Toronto, Canada with the Turingator
• Rupert Rawnsley of Cardiff, UK, who revived the ancient art of the lithophane through a steampunk-ish combination of artisnal craft and 3D printing, and
• The various folks (listed in the credits)  who wrote and performed the awesome Turiung/Gödel rap battle

Heck, the original Turing Elf has to have been Andrew Hodges, who is now a member of the Advisory Committe, but long before the Alan Turing Year was dreamt of he published Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983). His book  contributed critically to Turing’s rise from relative obscurity among the general public to something rather better than obscurity today — something bordering on fame, at least as far as awesome mathematicians experience it — and I have to imagine that it was a lonely thing indeed to have been a Turing Elf in those days.

All of which brings us to today’s Elves, the Klein 3 Group, a musical group who recorded a Turing Tune called No Deciding.

They are a band shrouded in mystery — or at least there appears to be little information about them on the net.  The artifact I want to draw to your attention is the YouTube video of No Deciding, which is embedded below, but beyond that there are few clues to their identity, whereabouts, or other output, despite repeated references to their “hit” album OK Computer Science, a riff on the Radiohead album OK Computer.

They have a sound file of No Deciding on SoundCloud, and the page there indicates that they’re from “Richmond, United States,” but doesn’t tell us if that’s the one in Virginia, the one in California, the one in Kentucky, or some other Richmond altogether. The lyrics to No Deciding are included in an academic handout that includes the bandmembers’ names (Sam Cole, Joe Kramer Miller, and David Leibovic), but I have no way of knowing if the list is correct.  (The handout is from a theory of compution course at Oberlin College).  If anyone finds anything more substatial about them, by all means let me know at nas@homoartificialis.com.

Be that as it may, I like the song and maybe you will too, so here it is.  You can find the lyrics below the video.  (I think the lyrics bear some resemblance to the lyrics of The Odds, who are great, though the music is entirely different.)

.

No Deciding

A tape that’s

full up with blank symbols

a 9-tuple that defines you

who knows if you’ll halt?

Q a set of states

and Gamma a set of symbols

Sigma, a subset of Gamma

The tape head

just moves left or right

delta brings us

back and forth with no deciding 3x

halting, problem,

this is my final state

my final configuration

back and forth with no deciding 3x

such a pretty proof of

such a pretty theorem

back and forth with no deciding 3x

Turing in Fiction — Greg Egan’s “Oracle”

Days to Centenary: 219

There is a small but not insignificant body of fiction which features Alan Turing as a character.  With great good luck it turns out that some very good examples of the oevre are available free online.

Greg Egan is a Hugo Award-winning Turing Elf, an Australian science fiction writer whom I have been aware of for a long time, but never quite got around to reading until now, which immediately made me realize that I should have been reading him for years.

The occasion for me to finally get around to sampling his work is a story of his from 2000 entitled Oracle that does several things at once.

First, it asks the question that is so often asked around the imaginary living room that this blog would have if it were in meatspace rather than cyberspace: what if Alan Turing had lived?

Second, it also — rather ambitiously, and I would say successfully — asks the question: how can one write a story based on the previous question  and make the manner in which he survived a real feature of the story rather than just a cheap device?

Finally, it asks the question: what would happen if you put Alan Turing and C.S. Lewis in a cage match battle over the reality or otherwise of the existence of the Christian God.

C.S. Lewis

Now, not having read anything else that Egan has written (an oversight I intend to remedy as soon as possible), I can’t say whether he’s an extremely fine writer who can regularly pose difficult challenges for himself and then handle them with aplomb or if the day he wrote this was just a really, really good day.  I suspect it’s the former — I even have at least a little bit of C.S. Lewis-like faith that it is — but the Turing in me points out that as yet I have no evidence either way.

However that may be, this story rocks.  Egan’s reputation is as a writer of hard science fiction, and his use of science in the story — to my amateur’s eye, anyway — is persuasive enough to at least not interfere with the suspension of disbelief despite some unprecedented events.  He imbues both of the main characters with a genuine breath of life.  He captures and holds your attention from start to finish (or at least he did mine).  And he allows his characters to do real battle over an important question without making either one of them a dumbass straw man.

If you want to find out more about the story, see some reader reactions, and  browse some “if you liked that then you’ll probably also like this” recommendations, check out its entry on the excellent Mathematical Fiction.

But before you do that, read the story.  As Alex said in that charming/creepy voice of his in Clockwork Orange ”You – are – invited!”  Greg Egan’s Oracle.

[The image of Lewis is by Sigurdur Jonsson and can be found here]

24 Chinese Rooms — Thinking With Meat, Thinking With Metal

Days to Centenary: 224

John Searle is an American philosopher who has proposed one of the most commonly cited arguments against the possibility of genuine artificial intelligence in a computing device.

His position — to oversimplify wildly — is that a computing device can convincingly imitate conscious communication without actually understanding what it’s saying at all, in apparent contradiction to the proposition underlying the Turing Test. His notion is called the Chinese Room Argument and its main points are nicely summarized by the one-minute video below.

Some Searle-ites contend that Searle’s position has been misunderstood by his detractors.  This short video provides some examples.

A detailed description of the argument, as well as of counterarguments, can be found at this page of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

One person who can’t really be accused of oversimplifying Searle’s arguments is one of his most vociferous opponents, Ray Kurzweil – an inventor, futurist, and fairly successful predictor of events – who used an entire chapter of his book Are We Spiritual Machines (the chapter is reproduced in full here) to rebut Searle’s position point by point and to demonstrate where Searle had misunderstood, or in some cases may have misrepresented, his (Kurzweil’s) arguments and those of other AI researchers.

I  have yet to find a good video of Kurzweil directly addressing this issue, but the video below will certainly orient you to who he is.  The video is the trailer for a documentary about Kurzweil called Transcendant Man.

[Note: Just because Kurzweil doesn't miss the subtle points of Searle's arguments doesn't in itself make Kurzweil right, it just makes him rigorous. I happen to think he's right, but there isn't enough room in this post to comprehensively debate the point and, frankly, as a mere interested hobbyist I'm not sure my views add much.]

Professor Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading, has contributed to the debate, among other things pointing out that even if Searle is right his point may well be irrelevant.

If anyone out there thinks they have found the knockout punch in the Chinese Room debate, by all means send it in to nas [at] homoartificialis.com and I’ll do an update to this post.

Now, why does the title say twenty-four Chinese rooms?  Because of an irrelevant-but-awesome video about a particular Chinese room.  The video can be found here. The still images below are screenshots.

Screen shot 01 from A Tiny Apartment Transforms Into 24 Rooms: Official Video

Screen shot 02 from Screen shot 01 from A Tiny Apartment Transforms Into 24 Rooms: Official Video

Touring Turing — Awesome Artists for a Genial Genius

Do not miss this: the official Alan Turing Year 2012 is on IndieGoGo.com to raise funds for a Turing-centric art exhibition that will be staged at a number of different venues.  This will be a travelling exhibit entitled  ”Intuition and Ingenuity,” which will include workshops, talks and other events.  As the title says, Turing’s touring.

There are some truly awesome artists already confirmed, including: Roman Verostko, Boredom Research, Patrick Tresset, Greg Garvey, Anna Dumitriu and Alex May.  Click on the artists’ links — you will not be underwhelmed.

So do the right thing and lend a hand! Donate a dollar, or a Euro, or some latinum if that’s what’s in your pocket! The Turing-elves command you! And an apparition which just might be the ghost of Alan Turing lurks in the background, in case you don’t. Forget the Ghost of Christmas Past — you do not wanted to be haunted by a mathematician. Click here to avoid the ire of the Turing-verse.

Now as a reward you get to watch one of Patrick Tresset’s robots in action. Enjoy.

The Desire for Enigma: The Mysterious Theft of the Code Machine

Days to Centenary: 234

On April 1, 2000 someone pulled a major April Fool’s prank, stealing one of only three Enigma code machines in the world from Bletchley Park. The Abwehr Enigma G312 machine was valued at £100,000.

Police believed that the machine had simply been carried out of the historic site, but don’t blame Bletchley Park. The enigma was secured in a glass cabinet which was not broken in the theft. An alarm system was in use and volunteers were watching over the site’s displays. Whoever carried out the theft was either very lucky or, more likely, very professional. All the more so because the theft happened just a week before a new infrared security system was to be installed.

Just what had happened to the machine was a mystery for several months. Then, in September 2000, police began receiving letters from a man who referred to himself as “the Master,” who claimed to be acting on behalf of a third party who had innocently purchased the machine, not knowing that it was stolen.

At one point police entertained the charmingly recursive theory that the letters from the Master contained coded clues as to the Enigma’s location and called in expert code breakers.

The Master’s letters demanded £25,000 for the machine’s return, to be paid by October 6, 2000. Bletchley Park announced that it would pay the ransom and had the money ready, but even as the deadline passed the Master failed to make contact to collect it.

Two weeks later Jeremy Paxman, a television presenter at the BBC, opened a parcel at his office and found the Enigma machine inside. It was missing a few parts, but these were later delivered as well.

Paxman and the purloined Enigma

Ultimately a dealer in World War Two memorabilia named Dennis Yates was charged with “handling” the stolen merchandise after admitting that he sent the letters and delivered the machine to Paxman. Yates was scheduled to stand trial at Aylesbury Crown Court, but decided at the last moment to plead guilty and was sentenced to ten months in jail.

In court, Yates said he had become involved in a scheme which soon passed out of his control and that his life had been threatened by persons involved in the theft. He never named the actual theives and they were never caught.

The title of this post is an allusion to a painting by Salvador Dali called The Enigma of Desire — My Mother, My Mother, My Mother (1929). Details of its creation and underlying psychology here.

On Hallowe’en I Wore My Homo Sapiens Costume

Days to Centenary:  236

On  Hallowe’en I wore my homo sapiens costume to hide the fact that I’m actually homo artificialis.  While the streets teemed with kids dressed as giant iPhones and Terminator robots, I wandered the city, for once passing the Turing Test simply by virtue of the fact that everyone’s attention was on the people who were trying to do the reverse, to pass for non-human.

Okay, not literally true, but it’s a nice little Hallowe’en fable.  Actually I spent the night at the house of some good friends, everything done up in a funk theme with old episodes of Soul Train being back-projected onto a sheet that hung in the front window and the sound turned way up so that the entire front of the house was turned into a giant television, running a constant stream classic funk artists playing to crowds of dancing Funkateers.

What I would love to have seen in our neighbourhood, is one of these awesome Alan Turing pumpkins.

The great Alan Turing pumpkin

This image comes to us care of one of our favourite sites, Boing Boing, and specifically BoingBoinger Xeni Jardin, although over here you can see it being created.

Turing pumpkin being gutted

Turing image being applied

And just to see how everything connects to everything else in the Turing-Net, if you look at the “making of” page, you’ll notice that the image used in making this pumpkin is actually the stencil of the Turingator, featured earlier on this blog.

In the Peanuts comics and cartoons Linus van Pelt waits up all night in the pumpkin patch, hoping to glimpse the Great Pumpkin.  I like to think that somewhere there’s a pumpkin patch where Linus Torvalds sits up all night, hoping to see this great pumpkin.

Happy Hallowe’en everyone.

Post Script:  If anyone went out dressed as Alan Turing or anything pertinent, like Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, a Terminator, or for that matter Snow White or an Apple, feel free to send in photos.  If I get responses then I’ll include them in a later post (unless you let me know that you don’t want yours posted).