Turing Test opera to embark on UK tour

The Turing Test, developed by mathematician and legendary wartime codebreaker Alan Turing to test a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour, is the subject of an opera by Scottish composer Julian Wagstaff, which will embark on a UK tour in October 2012. The Turing Test is set in the near future and tells the fictional story of a brilliant young PhD student named Stephanie, who is trapped in a bitter battle between two rival scientists racing to build the world's first truly intelligent computer. The opera, which received critical acclaim at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2007, is one hour long, and is scored for six voices and a small orchestra. It is sung in English, with one of the six singers playing the part of the computer. The tour marks the hundredth anniversary year of the birth of Alan Turing (1912–1954), who is widely considered to be the father of modern computing. The concept of a computer being able to imitate a human being was first expressed in a paper by Turing entitled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", published in 1950 in the journal Mind.