"The modern general-purpose computer can be characterized as the embodiment of a three-point philosophy: (1) There shall exist a way of computing anything computable; (2) The computer shall be so fast that it does not matter how complicated the way is; and (3) Man shall be so intelligent that he will be able to discern the way and instruct the computer." Proceedings of the 1955 Western Joint Computer Conference, Institute of Radio Engineers, New York, pp 101-108, 1955. (Also issued as RAND Technical Report P-620.)

Current issues are now on the Chicago Journals website. Read the latest issue.Since 1950, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (BJPS) has presented the best new work in the discipline. Published on behalf of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science, the journal offers innovative and thought-provoking papers that open up new areas of inquiry or shed new light on well-known issues.

The maze can be changed _ any desired mantler by rearranging the partitions between the twen --:five squares. In the maze there is a sensing finger, which can feel the -.:titions of the maze as it comes against them. This finger is moved .- The goal is mounted on a pin which can be slipped into a jack _ any of the twenty-five squares. Thus you can change the problem ..' way you choose, within the limits of the 5 x 5 maze.

' This work was done in collaboration with Drs. But it is attenuated because the electrode computes a weighted average over a volume of a function whose own average is zero. To this external medium, the nerve appears to produce, absorb, then produce current when a spike passes; from this probe's standpoint of view, the impulse is a source, followed by sink, followed by source. Their algebraic sum in time is zero, unless the impulse stops either at the electrode or short of it. In the former case, the preceding source is averaged with the initial part of the sink, but the stationary decaying sink is recorded as a large negative potential with respect to a remote electrode.

The entropy is a statistical parameter which measures, in a certain sense, how much information is produced on the average for each letter of a text in the language. If the language is translated into binary digits (0 or 1) in the most efficient way, the entropy // is the average number of binary digits required per letter of the original language. The redundancy, on the other hand, measures the amount of constraint imposed on a text in the language due to its statistical structure, e.g., in English the high frequency of the letter £, the strong tendency of H to follow T or of V to follow Q. It was estimated that when statistical effects extending over not more than eight letters are considered the entropy is roughly 2.3 bits per letter, the redundancy about 50 per cent. Since then a new method has been found for estimating these quantities, which is more sensitive and takes account of long range statistics, influences extending over phrases, sentences, etc.

It was named M achina speculatrix. "conditioned reflexes" brought the study The conditioned, 01' neutral, stimulus to which In M spheri-latrix we had:1 reflex. MACHINA SPECULATRIX, photographed by time cx-POSUI'E, is attracted by light in hutch at right. CONDITIONED REFLEX requires this arrangement of nerve cells. With this arrangement the model is reasonably docile.

An excellent place to start. In this article, Turing not only proposes the Imitation Game in its original form, but addresses nine different arguments against AI, including Goedel's theorem and consciousness. Several recent arguments against AI are variations on the ones Turing enumerates. 'I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think." The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous....The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the "imitation game."' I.—COMPUTING MACHINERY AND INTELLIGENCE. Mind 59, p. 433-460 (PDF from Oxford University Press).

Full text available for a fee. (The paper was first presented in March 1950 at the National Institute for Radio Engineers Convention in New York.)See also: summary slidesPhilosophical Magazine (Series 7) 41:256-275

The possible ways in which machinery might be made to show intelligent behaviour are discussed. The analogy with the human brain is used as a guiding principle. It is pointed out that the potentialities of the human intelligence can only be realized if suitable education is provided. The investigation mainly centres round an analogous teaching process applied to machines. The idea of an unorganized machine is defined, and it is suggested that the infant human cortex is of this nature. Simple examples of such machines are given, and their education by means of rewards and punishments is discussed.

Oliver Selfridge in The Gardens of Learning wrote: "I have watched AI since its beginnings... In 1943, I was an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and met a man whom I was soon to be a roommate with. He was but three years older than I, and he was writing what I deem to be the first directed and solid piece of work in AI (McCulloch and Pitts 1943) His name was Walter Pitts, and he had teamed up with a neurophysiologist named Warren McCulloch, who was busy finding out how neurons worked (McCulloch and Pitts 1943).... Figure 1 shows a couple of examples of neural nets from this paper---the first AI paper ever." From the introduction to the Warren S. McCulloch Papers, American Philosophical Society.http://www.amphilsoc.org/mole/view?docId=ead/Mss.B.M139-ead.xml;query=;brand=defaultAlthough an important figure in the early development of computing, McCulloch's goal in research was as much to lay bare the foundations for how we think as it was to develop practical applications - or in other words, to develop an "experimental epistemology" with which to relate mind and brain. Perhaps the most significant work to emerge from this period of McCulloch's career was his landmark paper with Walter Pitts, "A Logical Calculus Immanent in Nervous Activity" ( Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5 (1943): 115-133). The "Logical calculus" was an attempt to develop just that: a rigorous description of neural activity independent of resort to theories of a soul or mind. Together with McCulloch and Pitts' follow-up work, "How we know universals: The perception of auditory and visual forms" ( Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 9 (1947) 127-147), the "Logical calculus" provided a compact mathematical model for understanding neural relationships laying the groundwork for neural network theory and automata theory, and forming the ur-foundation of modern computation (through John Von Neumannn) and cybernetics. (See Marvin Minsky, Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967, for a very readable treatment of the computational aspects of McCulloch/Pitts neurons.")Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, 5, 115–137