COPElAND & BOwEN | 13
1950 Runs a program for calculating values of the zeta-function. Reports that the
program ran from mid-afternoon until breakfast time the next morning when
‘unfortunately at this point the machine broke down and no further work
was done’.Buys a Victorian red-brick semi, Hollymeade, in Wilmslow, an affluent
suburb of Manchester (Fig. 1.5). Tells his mother Sara ‘I think I shall be very
happy here’.Publishes his farsighted paper ‘Computing machinery and intelligence’ in the
philosophy journal ‘Mind’, securing his reputation as the father of AI.Describes his ‘imitation game’, the full-fledged Turing test.
1951 Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.
Gives a talk on BBC radio titled ‘Can digital computers think?’. Says ‘If a
machine can think, it might think more intelligently than we do, and then
where should we be?’ Discusses the idea of computers having free will.In a lecture predicts that thinking computers ‘would not take long to outstrip
our feeble powers’. Says we should ‘expect the machines to take control’.Meets Christopher Strachey (then working as a schoolteacher) at the
Manchester Computing Machine Laboratory. Suggests Strachey try writing
a program to make the computer check itself.Picks up a young man named Arnold Murray in Manchester’s Oxford Street.
1952 Broadcasts on BBC radio again, discussing whether computers can be said
to think. Predicts it will be ‘at least 100 years’ before any computer stands a
chance in the imitation game, with no questions barred.Reports a burglary at his house to the police. Admits to a sexual relationship
with Murray. Tried and convicted of ‘gross indecency’. Is sentenced to 12
months of ‘organo-therapy’ – chemical castration.Publishes ‘The chemical basis of morphogenesis’, pioneering mathematical
biology and artificial life. His allied research note ‘Outline of development of
the daisy’ reflects a childhood interest (Fig. 1.3).