Christof Teuscher – författare

Alan Mathison Turing (1912-1954) was the first to carry out substantial re­ search in the field now known as Artificial Intelligence (AI). He was thinking about machine intelligence at least as early as 1941 and during the war cir­ culated a typewritten paper on machine intelligence among his colleagues at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC & CS), Bletchley Park. Now lost, this was undoubtedly the earliest paper in the field of AI. It probably concerned machine learning and heuristic problem-solving; both were topics that Turing discussed extensively during the war years at GC & CS, as was mechanical chess [121]. In 1945, the war in Europe over, Turing was recruited by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL)! in London, his brief to design and develop an electronic stored-program digital computer-a concrete form of the universal Turing machine of 1936 [185]. Turing''s technical report "Proposed Electronic 2 Calculator" , dating from the end of 1945 and containing his design for the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), was the first relatively complete spec­ ification of an electronic stored-program digital computer [193,197]. (The document "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC", produced by John von Neumann and the Moore School group at the University of Pennsylvania in May 1945, contained little engineering detail, in particular concerning elec­ tronic hardware [202].

Turing's connectionism provides a detailed and in-depth analysis of Turing's almost forgotten ideas on connectionist machines. In a little known paper entitled "Intelligent Machinery", Turing already investigated connectionist models as early as 1948. Unfortunately, his work was dismissed by his employer as a "schoolboy essay" and went unpublished until 1968, 14 years after his death.In this book, Christof Teuscher analyzes all aspects of Turing's "unorganized machines". Turing himself also proposed a sort of genetic algorithm to train the networks. This idea has been resumed by the author and genetic algorithms are used to build and train Turing's unorganized machines. Teuscher's work starts from Turing's initial ideas, but importantly goes beyond them. Many new kinds of machines and new aspects are considered, e.g., hardware implementation, analysis of the complex dynamics of the networks, hypercomputation, and learning algorithms.

Alan Turing's fundamental contributions to computing led to the development of modern computing technology, and his work continues to inspire researchers in computing science and beyond. This book is the definitive collection of commemorative essays, and the distinguished contributors have expertise in such diverse fields as artificial intelligence, natural computing, mathematics, physics, cryptology, cognitive studies, philosophy and anthropology.The volume spans the entire rich spectrum of Turing's life, research work and legacy. New light is shed on the future of computing science by visionary Ray Kurzweil. Notable contributions come from the philosopher Daniel Dennett, the Turing biographer Andrew Hodges, and the distinguished logician Martin Davis, who provides a first critical essay on an emerging and controversial field termed hypercomputation. A special feature of the book is the play by Valeria Patera which tackles the scandal surrounding the last apple, and presents as an enigma the life, death and destiny of the man who did so much to decipher the Enigma code during the Second World War.

Alan Turing's fundamental contributions to computing led to the development of modern computing technology, and his work continues to inspire researchers in computing science and beyond. This book is the definitive collection of commemorative essays, and the distinguished contributors have expertise in such diverse fields as artificial intelligence, natural computing, mathematics, physics, cryptology, cognitive studies, philosophy and anthropology.The volume spans the entire rich spectrum of Turing's life, research work and legacy. New light is shed on the future of computing science by visionary Ray Kurzweil. Notable contributions come from the philosopher Daniel Dennett, the Turing biographer Andrew Hodges, and the distinguished logician Martin Davis, who provides a first critical essay on an emerging and controversial field termed hypercomputation. A special feature of the book is the play by Valeria Patera which tackles the scandal surrounding the last apple, and presents as an enigma the life, death and destiny of the man who did so much to decipher the Enigma code during the Second World War. Other chapters are modern reappraisals of Turing's work on computability, and deal with the major philosophical questions raised by the Turing Test, while the book also contains essays addressing his less well-known ideas on Fibonacci phyllotaxis and connectionism.