Turing: A poem 14 Sep 2009 By Matt Harvey from here: POEM: ALAN TURING here’s a toast to Alan Turing born in harsher, darker times who thought outside the container and loved outside the lines and so the code-breaker was broken and we’re sorry yes now the s-word has been spoken the official conscience woken – very carefully scripted but at least it’s not encrypted – and the story does suggest a part 2 to the Turing Test: 1. can machines behave like humans? 2. can we? H/T Language Log History Science
Epistemology Species, phenomena and data 2 Jun 20112 Jun 2011 Just lately I have been trying to support my belief that species are not units of biological theory, but phenomena that call for explanation. Several things have followed from this: Species turn out on this view not to be causal entities, but rather epiphenomena of causal processes at the individual… Read More
Evolution Going backwards, or, devolution? 29 Sep 2009 Carl Zimmer has another one of his excellent summary articles, this time about the problems encountered by a research group that tried to make a protein that had evolved into one form, evolve back to the starting point. This is being touted as a molecular version of “Dollo’s Law” (which is… Read More
On the topic of Turing and poetry, here (http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/loopsnoop.html) is a proof of the undecidability of the halting problem in the form of a poem! Written by linguist Geoffrey Pullum with the help of computer scientist Philip Wadler.