Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Authors’ Abstract

1. Alan Turing anticipated many areas of current research in computer and cognitive science.
2. This article outlines his contributions to Artificial Intelligence¹, connectionism, hypercomputation, and Artificial Life, and also describes Turing's pioneering role in the development of electronic stored-program digital computers.
3. It locates the origins of Artificial Intelligence² in postwar Britain. It examines the intellectual connections between the work of Turing and of Wittgenstein in respect of their views on cognition, on machine intelligence, and on the relation between provability and truth.
4. We criticise widespread and influential misunderstandings of the Church-Turing thesis and of the halting theorem. We also explore the idea of hypercomputation, outlining a number of notional machines that "compute the uncomputable".