As machines get ever more complex as we strive to make them complete more complex tasks, it’s time to ask again: will they ever be able to think? But what is thinking anyway?
The Imitation Game has scooped up eight Oscar nominations this year, including the coveted Best Picture. Since its release in autumn 2014 the film has attracted widespread positive critical appraisal and…
The acclaimed new movie The Imitation Game is based on the too-short life of Alan Turing, the British mathematician and “father” of computer science. But how true-to-life is it and what can we learn from…
The possibility that advanced artificial intelligence (AI) might one day turn against its human creators has been repeatedly raised of late. Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, for instance, surprised…
Alan Turing is one of the world’s best-known mathematicians, and probably the best known in the past century. This is partly for his work on cracking German codes in World War II, and partly for his arrest…
We have always been been intrigued by keeping secrets and uncovering the secrets of others, whether that’s childhood secret messages, or secrets and codebreaking of national importance. With a film, The…
Movies about mathematicians are rare, the problem being that the real action is all in the head. At first sight, maths doesn’t quite have the cinematic potential of a car chase or a romantic love story…
The Alan Turing story brings us face-to-face with many contrasts. None is more striking than that between this week’s red-carpet Gala premiere of The Imitation Game at the BFI London Film Festival, with…
After years of trying, it looks like a chatbot has finally passed the Turing Test. Eugene Goostman, a computer program posing as a 13-year old Ukrainian boy, managed to convince 33% of judges that he was…
As mentioned already on this site and others, this year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of famed British mathematician Alan Turing. The outline of his remarkable life and sad ending has by now…
You may have read the British Government is being petitioned to grant a posthumous pardon to one of the world’s greatest mathematicians and most successful codebreakers, Alan Turing. You may also have…