The Turing Guide

520 | NOTES TO PAGES 351–362

22. ‘Telepathy’, The Times (15 September 1949), 5.


23. The Piddingtons’ disinclination to be tested at the society’s headquarters might well have been due to
    the treatment that the ‘vaudeville telepath’ Frederick Marion had received when he had submitted to
    similar testing a decade earlier. Soal had conducted the tests. His conclusion, published in Nature in
    1938, was that Marion was ‘hyperaesthetic’—that is, he possessed visual, auditory, and tactical acuity
    of an unusually high order, but no telepathic capacities. For instance, when he identified a face-down
    playing card as the queen of diamonds, what he was really recognizing ‘was the actual piece of paste-
    board which he had previously touched, and not the value on the face of the card’. Not surprisingly,
    Marion took umbrage at this diagnosis. S. G. Soal, ‘Scientific testing of a vaudeville telepathist’, Nature
    (26 March 1938), 565–6; Soal and Bateman (Note 11), p. 96.


24. Turing (1950), p. 450.


25. Turing (1950), p. 458.


26. Turing (1950), p. 458.


27. Here and following, I quote from ‘Nature of spirit’, Turing Digital Archive, AMT/C/29; where neces-
    sary, I have inserted commas to make the sentences easier to follow.


28. Hodges (1983), p. 45.


29. Letter from A. M. Turing to S. Turing (16 February 1930), Turing Digital Archive, AMT/K/1/20.


30. Turing (1950), p. 458.


31. M. Campbell-Kelly, ‘Programming the Mark I: early programming activity at the University of
    Manchester’, Annals of the History of Computing, 2(2) (April 1980), p. 136.


32. Turing (1950), p. 458.


33. W. James, ‘The confidences of a “psychical researcher” ’, The American Magazine (October 1909), 580–9.


34. Turing (1950), p. 454.


35. Turing et al. (1952), p. 495.


36. Turing (1950), p. 458.


37. Turing (1947), p. 394.


38. Turing (c.1951), p. 475.


39. Turing (c.1951), p. 475.


40. Turing (1951), p. 484.


41. ‘Nature of spirit’ (Note 27).


42. C. Scott and P. Haskell, ‘ “Normal” explanation of the Soal–Goldney experiments in extrasensory per-
    ception’, Nature, 245 (7 September 1973), 52–3. For a detailed account of the manifold other ways in
    which Soal committed fraud, see C. E. M. Hansel, The Search for Psychic Power: ESP & Parapsychology
    Revisited, Prometheus (1989), pp.  100–15. For an investigation of the use and abuse of statistical
    methods in parapsychology, see J. E. Alcock, Parapsychology: Science or Magic?, Pergamon (1981).

CHAPTER 33 PIONEER Of ARTIfICIAl lIfE (BODEN)

1. Turing (1952).


2. This chapter draws on Chapter 15 of M. A. Boden’s Mind as Machine: a History of Cognitive Science,
   Clarendon Press (2006). Parts of it were given as the Fifth Turing Memorial Lecture (2009) at
   Bletchley Park.


3. William Blake, Songs of Experience (1794).


4. Boden (Note 2), Sections 4.i–ii, 10.i.f, 12.i.b, 16.ii.


5. See J. A. Anderson and E. Rosenfeld (eds), Talking Nets: an Oral History of Neural Networks, MIT
   Press (1998), p. 118.


6. Turing (1952), p. 522.


7. Turing (1952), Abstract.


8. E. T. Brewster, Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know, Grosset & Dunlap (1912).


9. M. A. Boden, ‘D’Arcy Thompson: a grandfather of A-Life’, in P. N. Husbands, O. Holland, and M. W.
   Wheeler (eds), The Mechanical Mind in History, MIT Press (2008),  41–60.


10. D. W. Thompson, On Growth and Form, Cambridge University Press (1917) (expanded 2nd edn pub-
    lished 1942).