kb/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computing_Machinery_and_Intelligence-3.md

title	chunk	source	category	tags	date_saved	instance
Computing Machinery and Intelligence	4/5	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computing_Machinery_and_Intelligence	reference	science, encyclopedia	2026-05-05T16:31:27.598653+00:00	kb-cron

== Learning machines ==

In the final section of the paper Turing details his thoughts about the Learning Machine that could play the imitation game successfully. Here Turing first returns to Lady Lovelace's objection that the machine can only do what we tell it to do and he likens it to a situation where a man "injects" an idea into the machine to which the machine responds and then falls off into quiescence. He extends on this thought by an analogy to an atomic pile of less than critical size, which is to be considered the machine, and an injected idea is to correspond to a neutron entering the pile from outside the pile; the neutron will cause a certain disturbance which eventually dies away. Turing then builds on that analogy and mentions that, if the size of the pile were to be sufficiently large, then a neutron entering the pile would cause a disturbance that would continue to increase until the whole pile were destroyed, the pile would be supercritical. Turing then asks the question as to whether this analogy of a super critical pile could be extended to a human mind and then to a machine. He concludes that such an analogy would indeed be suitable for the human mind with "There does seem to be one for the human mind. The majority of them seem to be "subcritical," i.e., to correspond in this analogy to piles of sub critical size. An idea presented to such a mind will on average give rise to less than one idea in reply. A smallish proportion are supercritical. An idea presented to such a mind that may give rise to a whole "theory" consisting of secondary, tertiary and more remote ideas". He finally asks if a machine could be made to be supercritical. Turing then mentions that the task of being able to create a machine that could play the imitation game is one of programming and he postulates that by the end of the century it will indeed be technologically possible to program a machine to play the game. He then mentions that in the process of trying to imitate an adult human mind it becomes important to consider the processes that lead to the adult mind being in its present state; which he summarizes as:

1. The initial state of the mind, say at birth,
2. The education to which it has been subjected,
3. Other experience, not to be described as education, to which it has been subjected. Given this process he asks whether it would be more appropriate to program a child's mind instead of an adult’s mind and then subject the child mind to a period of education. He likens the child to a newly bought notebook and speculates that due to its simplicity it would be more easily programmed. The problem then is broken down into two parts, the programming of a child mind and its education process. He mentions that a child mind would not be expected as desired by the experimenter (programmer) at the first attempt. A learning process that involves a method of reward and punishment must be in place that will select desirable patterns in the mind. This whole process, Turing mentions, to a large extent is similar to that of evolution by natural selection where the similarities are:

Structure of the child machine = hereditary material Changes of the child machine = mutations Natural selection = judgment of the experimenter Following this discussion Turing addresses certain specific aspects of the learning machine: