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On Alan Turing's anticipation of connectionism

Abstract

It is not widely realised that Turing was probably the first person to consider building computing machines out of simple, neuron-like elements connected together into networks in a largely random manner. Turing called his networks ‘unorganised machines’. By the application of what he described as ‘appropriate interference, mimicking education’ an unorganised machine can be trained to perform any task that a Turing machine can carry out, provided the number of ‘neurons’ is sufficient. Turing proposed simulating both the behaviour of the network and the training process by means of a computer program. We outline Turing's connectionist project of 1948.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Philosophy Department, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand

    B. Jack Copeland & Diane Proudfoot

Authors
  1. B. Jack Copeland
  2. Diane Proudfoot

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In Memory of Robin Gandy

The original online version of this article was revised: the article was made open access retrospectively.

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Copeland, B.J., Proudfoot, D. On Alan Turing's anticipation of connectionism. Synthese 108, 361–377 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00413694

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