Mind over Computer 17
In 1935, Turing was made a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and became interested in whether mathematical proofs could be found automatically. He wanted to know whether solving a mathematical puzzle was simply a matter of working through all the possibilities in a methodical manner, or whether something more subtle was required. Although chess is a fantastically complex game, it is finite, a big enough, fast enough computer can play the perfect game. Is this the case with discovering knowledge? Could a big enough, fast enough computer calculate all the knowledge in the Universe? Is Douglas Adams’ fabled computer Deep Thought a possibility, able to calculate the answer to the ultimate question of ‘life, the Universe and everything, albeit with a more enlightening answer than 42?
Turing boiled down the process of pencil and paper computation to a = Model of the Antikythera systematic program — a computer program. Mechanism He proposed a thought experiment where he would run every possible program and see if such a procedure would yield the solution to every imaginable mathematical problem. He was able to show this would lead
to a paradox and concluded the universal problem solver could not exist. His discovery is one of the most important of the 20" century — in the same league as relativity and quantum mechanics - and I will use it as my main tool in trying to explain the difference between brains and computers.
Although Turing’s original paper was not intended as a blueprint for a practical device, he was one of those rare mathematicians who also liked to tinker with real world machines. The outbreak of the Second World War made the practical application of his work very important, and in Chapter 8 I will relate some of the code breaking stories that were to make him famous and caused Churchill to credit him with shortening the war by two years.
Calling Turing’s work an ‘invention’ is probably the wrong term; ‘discovery might be more appropriate. Whatever you call it, people immediately equated human brains with computers. This is not new.
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