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
Evolution When do species begin? 11 Jun 200922 Jun 2018 Last night I attended a talk by Alexander Bird of Bristol on the metaphysics of natural kinds. I confess that a lot of it struck me as largely irrelevant to the actuality of the science as the level of metaphysics here, involving possible worlds and necessity, not to mention semantic… Read More
Creationism and Intelligent Design Objecting to the prevailing tide 12 Jun 2009 My friend and costudent of Gareth Nelson, Malte Ebach, persists in his campaign to bring some clarity to evolutionary and systematics thinking. I may not always agree with him, but he’s often clearer on these matters than his targets, so I refer you to his recent post on paraphyletic thinking…. Read More
Philosophy My species book receives a Choice award 11 Feb 202011 Feb 2020 I am delighted to tell you that my book Species: The Evolution of the Idea has received a 2019 Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title Award! The book met the meticulous Choice criteria from originality, uniqueness, and importance in building undergraduate library collections, to overall excellence in presentation and value to… 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.