Details of alan turing's Second Life

When I was a child, Turing was lively and active. At the age of 3, he made his first attempt in a scientific experiment-breaking the arm of the toy Woodenhead and planting it in the garden, hoping to make them grow into more Woodenhead. At the age of eight, Turing tried to write a science book called About Microscope. Although the child misspelled many words, he still wrote like that. At the beginning and end of the book, Turing echoed the same sentence "First of all, you should know that light is straight", but the content in the middle is short enough to break the record of scientific works.

Turing showed the spirit of scientific inquiry very early. He once said to his mother, "I always seem to want to make something out of the most ordinary things." Even playing football with friends, he only likes to be a linesman on the sidelines, because it will give him a chance to calculate the angle at which the ball flies out of bounds. The child seems to have a genius intuition and can see the answer to the question at a glance. One year, just after the middle school exam, an official in charge of the exam hurried to Turing's school and asked the principal to call several teachers to his office. "Look at these documents," the official said seriously. "All the answers are completely correct, but there are no intermediate steps. Does this student Turing really have this extraordinary ability? "

It took a lot of effort for teachers to exchange views with each other and then make up the intermediate process for these problems respectively. A teacher who is familiar with Allen told the headmaster, "The child has some strange ideas. One day I came up with a math problem about room lighting, and Turing gave the correct answer without thinking. But when I asked him for the formula, he said he didn't know it now, and it would take a few days to prove it. I deliberately waited for him for two days, watching him calculate on the manuscript paper, and sure enough, I deduced the formula, but he could realize the answer without knowing the formula. Tell a joke, Allen's brain can jump like a kangaroo. " Turing, who can "jump" thinking, 193 1 was admitted to the Royal College of Cambridge. After graduating from college, he stayed on as a teacher. In less than a year, he published several weighty mathematical papers and was elected as a researcher of the Royal Academy of Sciences. He is only 22 years old. To this end, his alma mater announced a half-day holiday to celebrate, and even Russell, a contemporary mathematician, wrote to invite him to give a lecture.

1937, the authoritative mathematics magazine in London received another paper by Turing, On Computable Numbers and Its Application in Determining Problems. This paper is a pioneering work to clarify the principles of modern computers, which is recorded in the history of computer development forever and shines the direction of modern computers. Later, von Neumann wrote in the article "General Logic Theory of Automatic Computers": "About 12 years ago, the British logician Turing began to study the following problems. He wants to give a general definition of the meaning of automatic computer. " In this article, von Neumann expounds Turing's great contribution in theory.

Anyone familiar with the history of science knows that great scientific inventions can only be realized after a major breakthrough in theory. Babbage and Ada worked hard all their lives to invent a universal computer-analyzer, but they didn't prove its feasibility in theory, relying only on their own experience and enthusiasm. The topic of Turing's thesis is not how to develop a specific computer, but how to solve a basic problem in the field of mathematics.

When he was still studying in Cambridge, Turing's genius brain often thought about the "computability" of mathematical functions. Physicist Archimedes once declared with a lever: Give me a fulcrum and I can move the earth. If there is such a fulcrum in the vast universe, as long as Archimedes is given enough time, such as hundreds of millions of years, the earth can indeed be moved by his lever. However, some mathematical functions can be solved by limited mechanical steps as long as people are given enough time to calculate them?

This is a mathematical problem that must be explained theoretically. Of course, traditional mathematicians will only think of using formulas to prove whether it is true or not. However, Turing, who had a "jump thinking" mind, didn't want to stick to the rules. He invented an invisible machine, an ideal computer.

Turing's virtual machine is simple to say: the computer uses infinite paper tape, which is divided into many squares, and some squares are painted with diagonal lines, representing "1"; Some did not draw any lines, representing "0". The computer has a read-write head device, which can read information from the magnetic tape or write information in the empty box. The only function of this computer is to move the paper tape one space to the right, and then change "1" into "0", and vice versa.

This is the "ideal computer" designed by Turing, and later people call it "Turing machine". In fact, this is a computer logic structure that does not consider the hardware state. In the paper, Turing also suggested that another "universal Turing machine" can be designed to simulate the work of any other "Turing machine". If "Turing Machine" is considered as an ideal computer, then "Universal Turing Machine" is the original model of general computer. Turing even thought of storing programs and data on paper tape, so Beavon Neumann put forward the concept of "stored program" earlier.

Turing transformed the derivation process of proving a mathematical problem into the running process of an automatic machine, which not only proved the mathematical problem, but also proved the possibility of manufacturing a general computer in theory with the idea of "general computer". His "general computer" is a model of modern general computer. As long as it is programmed, this machine can undertake any work that other machines can do. The general-purpose computers developed later, whether Z-3 developed by Chuze five years later, Mark developed by Aiken eight years later, or ENIAC, the first computer created by Mochili 10 years later, are all machines that Turing has been thinking about for a long time.

Professor Newman said with emotion: "It is difficult for people nowadays to realize how bold and innovative it is to introduce topics such as paper tape and perforation mode on paper tape into the discussion of mathematical basis." From "ideal computer" and "stored program" to "automatic programming" and "system simulation" later demonstrated, alan turing put forward many valuable theoretical viewpoints with his unique insight, which seems to be the goal pursued continuously in the history of computer development, and has been proved to be correct by subsequent development. Another joke is that at the beginning of the war, Turing had a premonition that Britain might fall. In order not to leave his personal savings to the German occupation army, he took out all the cash and replaced it with two large silver ingots, which were buried in two places and marked. However, after the war, although he kept a secret map of "hidden treasure", he still couldn't find the place where the silver ingot was buried. Frustrated, Turing made a mine detector and went into the jungle like an engineer, covered in mud, but still found nothing. Turing was always ashamed of his carelessness when others mentioned this past, but none of his colleagues took it to heart. Allen's careless style of personal trifles may be the root of a tragedy that should not have happened later.

1945, Turing, who took off his military uniform, was hired as a senior researcher at the National Institute of Physics in Taidington by the highest medal of honor awarded by the British Empire. Because of brayshay Le's practice, alan turing submitted a design scheme of "automatic computer" and led a group of excellent electronic engineers to start manufacturing a new computer called ACE. 1950 ACE computer prototype was publicly performed, which is considered as one of the fastest and most powerful electronic computers in the world. It used about 800 pipes and cost about 40 thousand pounds. When Turing introduced the storage device of ACE, he said, "It can easily remember the 10 page of a novel." Obviously, the memory capacity of ACE is larger than that of EANIC. The British seem to be particularly fond of secrecy. The 50-page ACE design report written by Turing was not published as a single book until 1972, and it was kept secret for 27 years.

1950, Turing came to teach at Manchester University and was appointed as the head of the school's automatic computer project. 10, another epoch-making paper was published. The thunder caused by this article is still shaking the computer century today. In the era when "the first generation computer" is dominant, this paper can even be used as a declaration of "the fifth generation computer" and "the sixth generation computer". Since then, people are more willing to call alan turing "the father of artificial intelligence". The title of this paper is "Computer and Intelligence", and later it was renamed "Can machines think?" When it was rewritten into the book. In this Declaration on Artificial Intelligence, Turing gave the definition of artificial intelligence for the first time from the perspective of behaviorism. In another supplementary article, Turing further wrote: "You can't make a machine that thinks for you", which is a commonly accepted cliche. My argument is that machines can be made that work very similar to the human brain. These machines sometimes make mistakes, but sometimes they come up with very novel ideas, and generally speaking, what they output will be as worthy of attention as what the human brain outputs. "More interestingly, Turing designed a famous" Turing Experiment ",trying to make the machine imitate people to answer some questions and judge whether the machine is intelligent through experiments and observations. He conceived a "question" and "answer" mode: the observer called two subjects by controlling the typewriter, one of whom was a person and the other was a machine. Observers and experimenters are isolated from each other and can't see each other. The "Turing Experiment" requires the observer to constantly ask various questions and distinguish which one is human and which one is machine according to the answers. Turing predicted that with the development of computer science and machine intelligence, such machines will appear at the end of this century. At this point, Turing may be too optimistic. But "Turing Experiment" boldly put forward the concept of "machine thinking", set the goal for artificial intelligence and pointed out the direction of progress.