Better known as the Turing test, the original imitation game posed the challenge of getting a machine to converse with a human so naturally that the exchange could be mistaken for one between humans. The Imitation Game takes its name from an experiment proposed by Alan Turing in 1950, while he was pioneering artificial intelligence research at the University of Manchester. That tricky question of the relationship between the human and the artificial is key to two new exhibitions in Manchester, this year’s European City of Science. It was both perverse and predictable that just five years after the birth of the modern computer, someone would use artificial intelligence to produce what machines neither need nor want. The answer, of course, was a gifted, under-occupied programmer. Designed to work on atomic bombs, X-ray crystallography and other serious science, what business had this Ferranti Mark 1 writing love letters? There was no great mystery about “MUC”, however: that could only be “Manchester University Computer”, the world’s first commercial programmable electronic computer. This was one of a number of enigmatic notes pinned to the computing department noticeboard at the University of Manchester, UK, back in August 1953.
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