This week's news on Alan Turing.
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Yorkshire aims at youth with its cannibalistic anthem
14 Maywww.guardian.co.uk
Jolliest version yet is recorded in the sunshine of the grisly tale of the Ilkley lover whose remains...well, best to check out the lyrics for yourself
Yorkshire is going through a period of extreme Yorkshireness at the moment, with a contest over the geographical centre of the county and a vast exercise in reworking the county anthem, On Ilkla Moor Baht 'At.
The first issue is one we'd best transfer to our distinguished, mathematical guest-blogger Professor S.Barry Cooper of Leeds University, whose series of posts about the Alan Turing Centenary Year for the Northerner is doing very well on Twitter and the like. Quite how you determine the centre of an irregular-shaped multihedron such as the three historic ridings is way beyond a humble Grade 6-er at elementary maths O level, which is what I am.
The contestants include the Ordnance Survey, which has triggered the current discussion by suggesting that the honour goes to a field in Sessay, an otherwise modest community in the flatlands north of York. Then there's a similar computer-based exercise done in 2008 which came down on the side of Cattal, another quiet community not far off. And the outsider is Barkston Ash near Selby, which bases its claim on traditions surrounding its eponymous series of ancient trees.
The Yorkshire Ridings Society is staying carefully neutral, backing none of the claims so far and adding an appealing hint of paranormal Tykery with the suggestion that the centre, like glaciers and the county's eroding coastline, may be 'moving about.' Sessay and Hutton parish council, one of no fewer than 631 in North Yorkshire, is also treating its potential claim to fame circumspectly. The question of whether to celebrate the OS finding officially is on the agenda of the next meeting but Coun Roger Hildreth says:
I think we want to be cautious at to what we do because if it changes, and we have paid for a sign to say we are the centre of Yorkshire, we are going to look very silly.
Meanwhile the Yorkshire-born gods, or God, beamed down on hundreds of people who turned up at the Cow and the Calf to for the Ilka Moor rejig, which also involves soldiers from the Yorkshire Regiment, a rap with Brian Blessed, soprano Lesley Garrett, the Grimethorpe Colliery Band, Fame Academy star Alistair Griffin and the Yorkshire choir Rock Up and Sing. The idea is to introduce the grisly hymn about a jilted lover's cannibalistic revenge to a 'new young global audience', somewhat on the lines of Coca Cola's I'd like to teach the world to sing.
The new version is being overseen by Eliot Kennedy from Sheffield, a songwriter and artistic producer on the X Factor who has got together with the tourism people at Welcome to Yorkshire. He says:
Ilka Moor is a beautiful song, a gorgeous song, you can't help sing along. It's been in my head all the time since we started this project. I think this song will last for decades. It's going to stand the test of time. I'm putting as much love and energy into this as any other record I do.
Gary Verity, chief executive of Welcome to Yorkshire adds:We're proud to be breathing new life into Yorkshire's national anthem. We hope it will capture the hearts of not only everyone in Yorkshire but also the UK and world-wide
The idea followed a survey by Otley brass band which found that one in ten of under-18s in the UK had never heard of the song. Once they discover that its hero dies of pneumonia after an illicit night of sex on the wuthering moor, is buried and eaten by worms, which are then eaten by ducks which then end up on the dinner plates of his rival suitors, this should change.The recording will be on YouTube later this year and you can follow its progress on Facebook here and Twitter here. Meanwhile here's a YouTube clip of Blessed getting stuck in, courtesy of the Sheffield Star. All profits from the song will go to the Yorkshire Regiment's charity arm and the Yorkshire Air Ambulance.
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Alan Turing: "I am building a brain." Half a century later, its successor beat Kasparov
14 Maywww.guardian.co.uk - science
The chair of the Alan Turing centenary celebrations, Professor S. Barry Cooper of Leeds University, continues his guest blog for the Guardian Northerner with a look at a legendary chess match
What is the link between Garry Kasparov, greatest chess player of all time, and World War II decoding genius Alan Turing, dead in Wilmslow of cyanide poisoning nine years before Kasparov was even born?
Back in 1944, at secret MI6 establishment Hanslope Park near Bletchley Park, Turing (the world's first computer scientist) talked of "building a brain". This was four years before the first 'stored program' computer, the 'Manchester Baby', was born. The first computing revolution had hardly begun.
Scroll forward 50 years - after 22-year old Kasparov had already become the youngest chess world champion ever - and we see IBM chess playing computer Deep Blue beat the best human player in the world. On the 15th anniversary of this victory in May 1997, here we are celebrating 100 years since Turing was born, with Kasparov himself (usual speaking fee $60,000) addressing the Turing Centenary Conference at Manchester Town Hall (June 22 to 26) and the Olympic flame passing by outside on Turing's actual birthday. It is a Turing-Kasparov link formed of computers, artificial intelligence, and Manchester.
We are of course a long way from building that brain that Turing dreamt of, and Kasparov talks interestingly about the difference between human and machine thinking. One of Turing's first discoveries when he was just 23 was that computers can't do everything. It was a short step from his 1936 dream of a computing future to a mathematical proof that most problems cannot be solved by any computer! And computers certainly have a hard time predicting all sorts of worldly events, from earthquakes, to weather, to economic crises.
Is there anything we can do that a computer can't? Could a computer write like Shakespeare - "to compute or not to compute, that is the Halting Problem"? Can we build an intelligent machine - and when?
Alan Turing is often dubbed 'the Father of Computer Science'. In 1950 he certainly took a paternalistic view of his 'late developer' computers. Not only did he considerthe measure of intelligence to be doing as well as a human: he only allowed humans to judge the competition. This is how he described his famous Test:
A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.
And the Turing Test is still with us, and is the basis for the famous Loebner Prize, with a reward of $100,000 for:the first computer whose responses are indistinguishable from a human's.
This year, the Turing Centenary Loebner Prize competition is on May 15 at Turing's wartime haunt of Bletchley Park. Watch for news of the winning machine. But it's a safe bet Hugh Loebner's $100,000 is safe.Underlying these 'X Factor for computers' competitions is a serious controversy. On one side we have Marvin Minsky, grand theorist of Artificial Intelligence, claiming:
AI has been brain-dead since the 1970s.
On the other, Rodney Brooks with his more experimental robot-centered approach admits:Marvin may have been leveling his criticism at me.
Many computer scientists think that what the brain does does not depend on the stuff it's made of. People like Brooks belioeve that 'embodiment' is important. And he is a big fan of Turing, saying in my forthcoming book Alan Turing - His Work and Impact (due from Elsevier in July):It is humbling to read Alan Turing's papers. He thought of it all. First.
Brooks is another of the giants of computer science converging on Manchester for the Turing Centenary Conference, speaking just after Kasparov on June 25.So how close are we to making a brain? It depends who you ask. Computers certainly do wonderful things nowadays. A nice Turing quote, seen on T-shirts, posters and coffee mugs these days, is this:
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.
It featured in Google chair Eric Schmidt's address to the huge Turing Celebration at Princeton University on 10 May. However, today's consensus is that the brain is just that bit more surprising than any of today's computers.But do we really want machines to think like humans? Turing thought that making mistakes was necessary for intelligent thought. What makes human intelligence work with all its fallibility is its interaction with others and with the wider world.
We rely on the fact that human brains are not manufactured on a production line, but evolve to represent a huge variety of very individual ways of 'computing', creatively yet fallibly. Can we learn to be as clever in building thinking machines as is the complex and beautiful world around us? And how will we deal with criminal computers? Future computer surprises can bring risks.
Here's a YouTube clip about the mighty match between Kasparov and Deep Blue. Follow the Alan Turing Year on Twitter at: @AlanTuringYear and for all the events happening in 2012, check out the Alan Turing Year website here.
Professor S. Barry Cooper is a mathematician at the University of Leeds. He is Chair of the Turing Centenary Advisory Committee (TCAC), which is co-ordinating the Alan Turing Year, and President of the association Computability in Europe.
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