356 | 32 TURING AND THE PARANORmAl
It is as if Turing, in envisioning what might happen to the machine, was displaying his own
capacity for precognition. For the fate that he feared that the machines would suffer—the delib-
erate circumscription of their freedom—was to be, in just a few years, his own.
Randomness and free will
The solution to the puzzle of argument 9 may lie in the random generator itself. As Turing
explained, its principal function was not to pull Zener-card symbols out of a hat, but to create
the impression that the machine had ‘free will’. As he explained in ‘Intelligent machinery, a
heretical theory’:^39
Each machine should be supplied with a tape bearing a random series of figures, e.g. 0 and 1 in
equal quantities, and this series of figures should be used in the choices made by the machine.
This would result in the behaviour of the machine not being by any means completely deter-
mined by the experiences to which it was subjected, and would have some valuable uses when
one was experimenting with it.
Randomness provides the computer with a means of giving the appearance that it functions like
a human brain, and in the imitation game appearances are everything. Or perhaps free will in
human beings is also illusory—a notion that Turing entertained in a 1951 talk on BBC radio:^40
It may be that the feeling we all have of free will is an illusion. Or it may be that we really have got
free will, but yet there is no way of telling from our behaviour that this is so. In the latter case,
however well a machine imitates a man’s behaviour it is to be regarded as a mere sham. I do not
know how we can ever decide between these alternatives, but whichever is the correct one it is
certain that a machine which is to imitate a brain must appear to behave as if it had free will, and
it may be asked how this is to be achieved. One possibility is to make its behaviour depend on
something like a roulette wheel or a supply of radium.
In 1932 Turing had written of a ‘will which is able to determine the action of the atoms
probably in a small portion of the brain, or possibly all over it’, but also of a ‘spirit’ which he
believed to be ‘really eternally connected with matter’. His conclusion was: ‘The body provides
something for the spirit to look after and use’.^41 So what of the thinking machine? It seems that
in this case chance, in the form of the random number generator, takes over the role of spirit.
Random numbers (the imaginary die thrown again and again) give the paradoxical impression
of free will. Yet does this mean that, in Turing’s view, chance and spirit are synonymous? Or is
there in this case an ‘amplifying apparatus’ by means of which the programmer, if no one else,
can perceive ‘remote effects of spirit’ that only resemble chance to the naked eye? As Turing
himself knew full well, chance could be faked as easily as it can be manipulated. As he noted in
his 1951 BBC talk, ‘It is not difficult to design machines whose behaviour appears quite random
to anyone who does not know the details of their construction’.
It turned out that S. G. Soal was also cooking the books. In 1973, two years before his death,
an article in Nature revealed that in his 1940–41 experiments with Basil Shackleton he had
systematically changed 1s to 4s and 5s on the score sheets, thereby tilting the statistical balance
in favour of the percipient. In this effort he may have been assisted by his agents, in particular
‘Rita Elliott’, whom he subsequently married. It was his own imitation game.^42