Word: paper
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hominid species, best represented by the 3.2 million-year-old Lucy skeleton I had discovered four years earlier at Hadar, Ethiopia. When I presented these findings in May 1978 at a Nobel symposium in Sweden, Mary had already agreed to be one of the coauthors on the scientific paper defining the new species, Australopithecus afarensis. A few months later, however, when the paper was being printed, she cabled me demanding removal of her name. I respected her wishes and had the title page redone. Like Louis, she did not believe Australopithecus was our ancestor; if her finds at Laetoli were...
Does this concept--a fairly rudimentary assemblage of hardware performing prodigious and multifaceted tasks according to the dictates of the instructions fed to it--sound familiar? It certainly didn't in 1937, when Turing's seminal paper, "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem," appeared in Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. Turing's thoughts were recognized by the few readers capable of understanding them as theoretically interesting, even provocative. But no one recognized that Turing's machine provided a blueprint for what would eventually become the electronic digital computer...
Turing's 1937 paper changed the direction of his life and embroiled a shy and vulnerable man ever more directly in the affairs of the world outside, ultimately with tragic consequences...
Since his original paper, Turing had considerably broadened his thoughts on thinking machines. He now proposed the idea that a machine could learn from and thus modify its own instructions. In a famous 1950 article in the British philosophical journal Mind, Turing proposed what he called an "imitation test," later called the "Turing test." Imagine an interrogator in a closed room hooked up in some manner with two subjects, one human and the other a computer. If the questioner cannot determine by the responses to queries posed to them which is the human and which the computer, then the computer...
...while working on the Ferranti Mark I, the first computer sold commercially. They taught him to think unconventionally; he'd play games over the breakfast table with imaginary numbers (what's the square root of minus 4?). He made pretend computers out of cardboard boxes and five-hole paper tape and fell in love with electronics. Later, at Oxford, he built his own working electronic computer out of spare parts and a TV set. He also studied physics, which he thought would be a lovely compromise between math and electronics. "Physics was fun," he recalls. "And in fact a good...