Humane Humanoids vs. Mercantile Homo Sapiens

© Huma Shah March 2017

The fear of intelligent machines draws analogies with Luddites’ rejection of 19th-century industrial methods, increasing production at the cost of human labour, and 21^st century concerns over foreigners taking jobs.

The 4^th Industrial Revolution’s intelligent technologies will execute many jobs we humans do, but much better, in all sorts of industries including financial, legal, education and transportation. Machines will observe the results of their behaviour, modify their own programmes “so as to achieve some purpose more effectively” (Turing, 1950, p.449). Such intelligent machines are not the biggest existential risk to our species. The mercantile human is and has been throughout history.

The human species is a mercantile breed for whom trade has eclipsed benevolence over the centuries. Past great empires were enriched on the backs of human slaves (Frankopan, 2016). Vegetarian Leonardo Da Vinci’s ingenuity included military designs that could throw inflammable materials causing serious injury to enemies of the 15^th century Milanese (White, 2001).

Humanity’s penchant for personal pleasure through cruelty to others is viscerally captured in the new TV series Westworld (2016). It depicts a future game world in which wealthy guests, the outsiders are hosted by humanoids on whom the vilest acts can be perpetrated through depraved scenarios designed by the narrative department at the adventure park. Human visitors act out their desires inflicting pain, after which each robot’s memories are wiped to erase the suffering in a session: “these violent delights lead to violent ends” (Shakespeare, quoted in Westworld, 2016). We need only open a newspaper on any given day and learn what horrors we humans wreak on each other.

Nonetheless, “limitations of the human intellect” (Turing, 1950, p.445) require us to develop smart machines. Guidelines on future and emerging technologies (Palmerini et al., 2014), applied by multidisciplinary teams learning from and reducing mistakes of the “sufficiently elaborate” machines (Turing, 1951, p. 473; Shah, 2013), even if they do “outstrip our feeble powers” could ensure they do not “take control” (p. 475).  Advances in intelligent technologies, through the following of instruction and learning from experience, will produce driverless vehicles reducing road casualties, enhance student engagement through deployment of bots in pedagogy, medics diagnosing accurately and sooner, surgical operations increasingly error-free, deep learning programmes improving performance for our savings and investments, conversational humanoids attending the elderly and the unwell for dignified living, sophisticated programmes helping us to harness nature and prevent damage from weather-related disasters, and all-seeing machines (Person of Interest, 2015), monitoring to protect our privacy and secure us from cyber-criminals. Why would we not want this future?

Anxiety over future machines intent on malfeasant behaviour is valid, but so is the dread of the Homo sapiens who have put aside humane actions to ensure competitive trade advantages for their own particular group. Cooperative interdisciplinary human teams constructing social, cultural, ethical, moral and legally-binding technologies could lead to equitable sharing of the planet’s natural resources. Artificial Intelligence does not have to be a threat to humankind, it can help us to preserve our species for longer.

© Huma Shah March 2017

References

Frankopan, P. 2016. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. Bloomsbury Paperback, London UK.

Palmerini, E., Azzarri, F., Battaglia, F., Bertolini, A., Carnevale, A., Carpaneto, J., Cavallo, F., Di Carlo, A., Cempini, M., Controzzi, M., Koops, B.J., Lucivero, F., Mukerji N., Nocco, L., Pirni, A., Shah, H., Salvini, P., Schellekens, M. and Warwick, K. 2014. Guidelines on Regulating Robotics. Deliverable D6.2 EU FP7 RoboLaw project: Regulating Emerging Robotic Technologies in Europe-Robotics Facing Law and Ethics, SSSA-Pisa.  Report accessible from http://www.robolaw.eu/

Person of Interest (2015). http://www.cbs.com/shows/person_of_interest/

Shah, H. 2013.  Conversation, deception and intelligence: Turing’s question-answer game. Chapter in Cooper, S.B. and van Leeuwen J. (Eds), Alan Turing: His Work and Impact, pp. 614-620. Elsevier.

Turing, A.M. 1951. Intelligent Machinery, A Heretical Theory. In Copeland, B.J. (Ed). The Essential Turing: The ideas that gave birth to the computer age. Oxford University Press, UK

Turing, A.M. 1950. Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind, Vol 59(236), 433-460

Westworld. 2016. HBO: http://www.hbo.com/westworld/about/index.html

White, M. 2001. Leonardo Da Vinci: The First Scientist. Abacus paperback edition, London, UK.

Hugh Loebner did a David Bowie: Died Surprisingly Quietly.

© Huma Shah, December 11, 2016

Hugh Loebner from 2006 Prize, UCL

 One week ago, December 4, 2016 a tweet from @eloebner announced “Hugh LOEBNER died peacefully in his sleep” [1].

Hugh Loebner’s ex-wife’s message didn’t sink in. That day, like many, I was in anticipation of Westworld TV show’s Season 1 finale [2] promised by Sky Atlantic to air at the same ‘time’ (2am UK 5 Dec) as for viewers in the US (9pm Dec 4), the mesmerising “dawning of consciousness” [3] robot epic based on the 1973 movie starring Yul Brynner as the refusing-to-die killer robot [4].

One week on, I’m reminded of John Sundman’s 2003 article in Salon Artificial Stupidity [5]:

“All Hugh Loebner wanted to do was become world famous, eliminate all human toil, and get laid a lot. And he was willing to put up lots of good money to do so. He’s a generous, fun-loving soul who likes to laugh, especially at himself. So why does everybody dislike him so much? Why does everybody give him such a hard time?”

I don’t think this is the time to go over his human failings, because we all have them, what I do want is to remind the academic world and beyond how approachable Hugh Loebner was. And yes he did have a sense of humour, read his cheeky retort claiming that the (now late) Marvin Minsky supported the Loebner Prize [6]. But more than that, Hugh had a profound understanding of Turing’s idea about how to build and measure whether a machine could think [7] - see his response to Stuart Shieber’s article Lessons from a Restricted Turing test [8].

I’m loathe to divulge personal experiences of interactions with Hugh Loebner, and there were many. I first saw him in 2003 at the 13^th Loebner Prize contest at the University of Surrey. Then from 2005 discussions began for me to organise his 16^th contest. I co-organised two Loebner Prizes: at UCL in 2006 [9], and at Reading University in 2008 [10]. Hugh allowed me to design his 18^th contest as an original Turing test experiment different from all his previous Prizes– see Chapter 5 in my PhD thesis [11]. I can say as late as 2014, long after I’d gone my own way designing my own Turing test events, at Bletchley Park [12] on the 100^th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth June 23^rd, 2012, and another on the 60^th anniversary of Turing's passing away, at The Royal Society London [13], 6-7 June, 2014, Hugh remained approachable. He responded swiftly to my queries on the pass-rate in his 2014 Loebner Prize (I was concerned and have many emails making a plea not to use the ‘unsure’ score in my own 2014 Turing tests as part of a RoboLaw project dissemination event, and the media backlash following prove me right, but that’s another story).

Anyway, Hugh clarified that in his 2014 contest “The program must fool half the judges. That automatically means it will be compared to two different humans. Each judge meets each human once.” (Personal email to me: 18 May 2014 at 16:26).

Back to Hugh’s own words, here’s Hugh’s analysis of his own scholarship. It conveys his ability to self-mock. In early 2005 I had posed a question on Robby Garner’s Yahoo Robitron group message board: Knowledge and a Doctorate: to be a doctor or not, that is the question.

This is how Hugh Loebner replied:

16 March 2005:  "I pose the following question: Am I a fraudulent Ph.D.?

Affirmative: I submitted the dissertation for my Ph.D. knowing full well that the results were garbage.  I published (jointly with my chairman) the results of my dissertation in the Journal Demography (top journal in the field) knowing full well that the results were garbage.

Negative: I did not alter the data.  I performed my statistical calculations as I described.  I explicitly explained and described why the results were garbage.

Why were the results garbage?

I reanalyzed some data on fertility in Central India which the chairman of my committee had collected and previously analyzed using cross tabulations and published as a book.

Rather than perform cross tabulations as my chairman had done, I used the method of 'path analysis', the 'hot' new statistical analysis in sociology/demography at the time.

Path analysis proceeds in three steps.

1.  Take a piece of paper and mark dots on the paper representing variables of interest. 

2.  Based upon 'theory,' draw arrows from some dots to some other dots
representing causation 

3. After the arrows are drawn (based upon 'theory') perform a multiple regression analysis to put numbers next to the arrows indicating relative strengths of the 'causes.'

Note Well:  The choice of paths (arrows) is based upon "theory."  The data do not reveal the causal network.  The data reveal the strengths of the causes *given whatever particular path diagram is drawn.*

I asked the question (which apparently no one else has ever considered): given N variables, how many different possible path diagrams can be drawn?

Note that with N variable 1, 2, 3, 4 ... n, there are n*(n-1) = M  ( 1  -> 2; 2 -> 1; 1 -> 3; 3 ->1; ... etc) possible arrows (causes), only some of which, presumably, are correct.  We can have every path
diagram from the null case (nothing directly causes anything else eg no arrows on the page) to the complete case, (every variable causes every other variable eg every possible arrow on the page).

Given M objects, how many different subsets can be drawn.  The answer is "the Power Set" = 2^m .

The answer to the question "How many path diagrams are possible given M arrows?"  is 2^M.  M, remember, is the number of arrows, not variables.

My analysis had 22 variables(dots).  This means that the number of possible causes (arrows) was 22*21=462 possible arrows.  The number of possible path diagrams for my set of variables is 2^462, which is a very large number.  Only one path diagram can be correct, therefore, as a first approximation, the p that my path diagram was correct is 1/(2^462)  I pointed this out on page 3 of my dissertation and column 3 of the article, and then said "with this limitation in mind, lets analyze the results."

Ergo, the results were garbage.

Am I a fraud?  My results were garbage, but I said it first.  If anyone critiques my dissertation (or article) I can reply: "Yes, of course, but I already said that."    ;-) Hugh

And that’s how I will remember Hugh-the-original  :)

© Huma Shah, December 11, 2016

References

[1] Elaine Loebner on Twitter: https://twitter.com/eloebner

[2] Westworld 2016: http://www.hbo.com/westworld

[3] JJ Abrams at Westworld premiere: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJQOXPbmjd8

[4] Westworld 1973: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070909/?ref_=nv_sr_2

[5] Artificial Stupidity, Salon, February 23, 2003: http://www.salon.com/2003/02/26/loebner_part_one/

[6] Home of the Loebner Prize: http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html  and

1995 Loebner Prize Announcement: http://loebner.net/Prizef/minsky.txt

[7] From the Buzzing in Turing’s Head to Machine Intelligence Contests:    https://www.academia.edu/226311/From_the_Buzzing_in_Turings_Head_to_Machine_Intelligence_Contests

[8] Hugh Loebner: In Response to Stuart Shieber: http://loebner.net/Prizef/In-response.html

[9] 2006 Loebner Prize: http://loebner.net/Prizef/2006_Contest/loebner-prize-2006.html

Blog with pictures: http://humashah.blogspot.co.uk/2006/09/loebner-2006-contest-day.html

[10] 2008 Loebner Prize:

http://loebner.net/Prizef/2008_Contest/loebner-prize-2008.html  and

Reading University page:

https://www.reading.ac.uk/15/research/ResearchReviewonline/featuresnews/res-featureloebner.aspx

[11]. Deception-detection and machine intelligence in Practical Turing tests. https://www.academia.edu/415888/Deception-detection_and_machine_intelligence_in_practical_Turing_tests

[12] Turing100in2012 at Bletchley Park:

http://www.reading.ac.uk/news-and-events/releases/PR445524.aspx

[13] Turing2014 at The Royal Society, London: http://turingtestsin2014.blogspot.co.uk/

[14] RoboLaw: http://www.robolaw.eu/

Why the Winograd Schema Challenge is not an advance on the Turing test

© Huma Shah, 22 November, 2016

Charles Ortiz of Nuance Communication states: “The Winograd Schema Challenge provides us with a tool for concretely measuring research progress in commonsense reasoning, an essential element of our intelligent systems." (from here ).

So does the Turing test!

The Winograd Schema Challenge is not superior to the Turing test. This is because, the kinds of common-sense reasoning questions that Hector Levesque proposes are the kinds of ‘statements-followed-by-questions’ that judges already ask in English-language Turing test contests.

For example, in the 2008 Turing test experiment I designed (around the 18^th Loebner Prize for AI) at Reading University, one of the judges (a psychologist), asked Eugene Goostman machine ‘My car is red. What color is my car?’. In 2008 Eugene Goostman replied correctly with ‘red’.

To me the Winograd Schema Challenge is a condescension and presumption that Turing test judges don’t have the intellectual faculty to ask smart questions to determine human from machine. The transcripts show that most judges do. Whether the judges are members of the public including teenagers, computer scientists or journalists, they ask all sorts of visceral questions during Turing test contests.

What a major Turing test challenge needs is not pittance prizes but a major few-million -sterling-pounds or 10million dollars award to address and build a truly Turing-conversational system.

Conversational commerce will drive question-answer systems to beyond common-sense reasoning. What is that anyway? Knowledge gained by experience :)

© Huma Shah, 22 November, 2016

Turing test is more than mere theatre: it shows us how we humans think.

© Huma Shah October 2016

Is the Turing test mere theatre?

You might question why anyone bothers to stage Turing test experiments when a computer programme achieved 50% deception rate in the first instantiation, the inaugural Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence in 1991. Back then judges were restricted to asking questions specific to each hidden entity, human or machine’s specialism. Whimsical conversation was the topic winner in 1991 from Joseph Weintraub’s PCTherapist III programme: http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/weintraub-bio.html

Since then machine simulation of natural language has moved on and we see chatbots with characters able to express opinions, share ‘personal information’ and tell it like it is! This from Elbot /Artificial Solutions  (http://www.elbot.com/) during a chat with this blogger on Oct 6, 2016: “You have quite an imagination. Next thing you know you'll say I needed batteries!”

For me the interest comes from movie talking robots, recently sensationally experienced in Ex Machina where the female embodied robot Ava perpetrates the ultimate deception, or does she? Well it wasn’t quite what Ava’s programmer in the movie, Nathan had imagined. And of course HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey who talked and lip-read to a menacing end in Kubrick’s truly glorious cinematic production.

Experiencing the 13^th Loebner Prize at University of Surrey in 2003 I felt tweaking that format could produce some interesting data. After all, Turing’s imitation game was as much concerned with finding out how we humans think as it is about exploring the intellectual capacity of a machine through its ability to answer any question in a satisfactory and sustained manner – Turing’s words (Computing Machinery and Intelligence, 1950).

Two decades from the 1^st Turing test instantiation developer Rollo Carpenter claimed his programme Cleverbot was considered to be 59.3% human, following 1334 votes cast at a 2011 event in Guwahati, India.

Up to the year 2003 the method of practical Turing tests involved a human interrogator interviewing one hidden entity at a time. This is what I have named the viva voce Turing test in my PhD, ‘Deception-detection and Machine Intelligence in Practical Turing tests’.  In 2008 I designed a Turing test experiment in which, for the first time, control pairs of 2machines and 2humans were embedded among pairs of human-machine set-ups. In this layout each interrogator simultaneously questioned a hidden pair and had to decide which was human and which was machine. The 2008 Turing tests were also the first time in which school pupils were given the opportunity to participate as judges and hidden humans.

The new book, ‘Turing’s Imitation Game: Conversations with the Unknown’ details that experiment and two follow up Turing test events, in 2012 at Bletchley Park held on the 100^th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth, June 23^rd as part of the worldwide centenary celebrations, and at The Royal Society London in 2014, on the 60^th anniversary of Turing’s untimely and sad death.

Each experiment had an incremental purpose, including to scale machine performance in dialogue and whether they were getting better at answering questions in a satisfactory manner. As readers will learn from the book, we humans do not always answer a question appropriately, so should we be harsh when machines don’t, especially as they are learning programmes and a lot ‘younger’ than some of the youngest human judges?

Implementing Turing tests is actually quite hard work. Finding open-minded human interrogators and human foils for the machines as well as motivating developers of computer programmes to participate, takes time and persuasion. Not everyone is happy at the conclusions, as can be evidenced by the many negative and angry comments across tech magazines and newspaper articles, especially after the 2014 experiment. The Turing test does this, it is one of those controversial areas of science that brings out the proprietorial impressions; everyone feels their interpretation is the one Turing intended.

I am really grateful for all the participants, humans and machine who have participated in our experiments – more than 80 judges, 70 hidden humans, and for the ingenuity, patience and collaboration of the developers: Fred Roberts for Elbot; Robby Garner for JFred-TuringHub; Rollo Carpenter for Cleverbot; Robert Medeksza for Ultra Hal, and Vladimir Veselov and his team for Eugene Goostman. You will meet these conversationalists, or chatbots in the book. I hope it encourages more school pupils and the general public to take interest in the Turing test and get involved in the challenge. There’s still more to be done here :)

What is the Turing test?

For the October 2016 launch of Turing's Imitation Game: Conversations with the Unknown, publisher Cambridge University Press asked the authors for answers to fundamental questions on the Turing test. Co-author, Huma Shah answers hers below:

Image: Harjit Mehroke

CUP: The Turing test was originally devised by Alan Turing in 1950. Why write a book about it now?

Huma: Turing actually devised his imitation game in his 1948 paper, ‘Intelligent Machinery’, considered the first manifesto of artificial intelligence. Turing’s test aims to investigate the intellectual capacity of machines, so it is as relevant today as when he was developing his ideas more than 60 years ago, especially because we are building more and more computer programmes and robots to conversationally interact and collaborate with humans.

CUP: What reactions have you seen in people who have taken the test?

Huma: Judges and hidden humans have mostly enjoyed their participation. However when some judges who got it wrong learn they did not accurately categorise humans as humans and machines as machines they ask all sorts of questions to mitigate their error, such as ‘Were the humans told to act like machines?’ – they were not, all humans in our experiments have always been asked to be themselves. However, what these judges probably have not realised is that error-making is part of intelligent thinking, it’s one way of how we learn and improve.

CUP: Why has the Turing test been controversial?

Huma: Because it questions the very nature of what it means to be human, and conversation-natural language is most human. Different interpretations of Turing’ ideas exist as to the purpose of the test with lots of disagreements, but this is healthy and democratises science and empirical work.

CUP: There is a popular misconception that the Turing test is a test for human-like intelligence in machines. But what is it really?

Huma: No, it is not a test for human-like intelligence but an exploration of whether a machine can ever answer any question put to it in a satisfactory and sustained manner. Of course the judgement of whether an answer to a particular judge’s question is relevant rests with the interrogator who might feel a machine’s response is more appropriate than a human’s answer to the same question.

CUP: Has a machine passed the Turing test? What is the significance of that event?

Huma: No, not in the sense that Turing would have envisaged. What has been achieved in the 2014 Royal Society London held experiment could be said to be the first challenge being overcome, that of wrong identification by 30% of a panel of judges. But this is open to interpretation of one statement of Turing’s in his 1950 paper ignoring what he said before and after. We do not yet have in existence the kinds of machines Turing envisaged that would play his imitation game satisfactorily.

CUP: Can machines think?

Huma: It depends on what you mean by thinking J  In place of circular definitions Turing posed his imitation game and felt that if a machine could answer any question in a satisfactory and sustained manner then that would not be an easy contrivance.

Turing's Imitation Game: Conversations with the Unknown

New book published by Cambridge University Press, September 2016:

Turing's Imitation Game: Conversations with the Unknown
co-authored by  Kevin Warwick and Huma Shah

Based on Shah's PhD thesis, Deception-detection and Machine Intelligence in Practical Turing tests, the book presents interviews with two contemporaries of Alan Turing, (the late) Professor John Westcott, and Sir Giles Brindley co-members of the Ratio Club. It tells the story of the origins of the ideas that gave rise to the Turing test and introduces you to Developers of computer programmes and the chatbots that attempt to answer any question in a satisfactory manner.

The book is appropriate for 'A' level and university students and teachers with interest beyond computer science: design, engineering natural language, linguistics, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, robotics, ethics and cybercrime/deception-detection.

Review of Alan Turing biopic ‘The Imitation Game’

“What if only a machine can defeat another machine?”

Last night, Wednesday 8^th October 2014 I was one of the lucky ones, packed into a Cineworld (High Wycombe in my case), watching a simultaneous screening of the London premiere and gala opening of ‘The Imitation Game’ biopic of my hero Alan Turing (My PhD is based on the imitation game to explore machine thinking). Thank you to Show Films First, Amex and the BFI 2014 Film Festival for making this opportunity possible.

Drawing away from the film the mantra ‘Don’t be normal, be Turing’ reverberated in my thoughts all the way back to my home in a London suburb.

Watching the film compels you not to try to 'fit in', it will be seen as a pretence and you’ll be dismissed for it, better to be yourself, be as brilliant as it is possible for you to be, you may be disliked intensely, it may polarise people’s opinions about you, (in the cricket world currently one only has to look at how a batting "talent that comes along too rarely" Kevin Pietersen has been treated by some of his fellow team members and the English Cricket Board, ECB). But being despised is better than being ignored. Turing was not ignored, no one could ignore Turing.

Stepping back to yesterday morning, before I saw ‘The Imitation Game’ movie, I had really wanted Leonardo DiCaprio to play Turing, as had been mooted in 2011 with Ron Howard to direct Graham Moore's script based on Oxford mathematician Andrew Hodges' biography. Leo has a similar square-ish face shape to Turing’s – handsome. 

Young Turing_Young Leo

Benedict Cumberbatch’s face is elongated and he doesn’t look anything like Turing, but then neither do Derek Jacobi (BBC Breaking the Code) and Ed Stoppard (Channel 4’s Codebreaker) who have also played Alan Turing. 

Adult Turing - Derek Jacobi - Ed Stoppard

Benedict is Sherlock Holmes, he seems to epitomise that kind of annoying logical smartass and mechanical sleuth. 

Yesterday Benedict was Turing. 

Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing in 'The Imitation Game'

Let’s turn to what I felt after seeing ‘The Imitation Game’ film.

In 'The Imitation Game' film, the characters, and brilliant acting talent portraying the people around Turing at times in his life, included:

Mark Strong (Welcome to the Punch, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Kick Ass) plays the mysterious but Turing-supportive MI6 head Stewart Menzies who passed Turing’s 1941 request for resources to Churchill. That Prime Minister responded and gave the resources in the plea, unlike David Cameron who had no money to support the Alan Turing centenary events in 2012, including the ‘London Inspire Mark’ award winning Turing100 series of practical Turing tests at the place where Turing broke the enigma code, well, not in Hut 8, but in Bletchley Park mansion’s Billiard and Ballroom on 23 June 2012. 

Turing’s 100^th birthday. Mark Strong said, on the red carpet of the gala opening of the BFI London Film Festival: “I hope enough people in the UK know who Alan Turing is, because he is a hero”. Last night in Cineworld at least one of the staff members learnt who Alan Turing was, she asked me after the film what I thought and what certificate it should have, I feel it’s okay for children to watch with parents, in fact they should watch because it will inspire them. More than an Oscar or any ‘gong’, if this movie reaches more people beyond the world of us academics who work in his legacy, widens the circle of interest in Turing, then the film will be a major achievement of the entire production and cast.

Charles Dance said of his character in the film, Commander Denniston, that he was “a bit of a prat” . I’ll leave the reader to watch the film and find out why J

Keira Knightly. One can forget that her character, Joan Clarke, is not a made-up female drawing on cinematic licence ticking all the boxes to connect movies with movie-goers watching them, and who will want to watch them over and over again. Joan Clarke was very real, a first-class Cambridge-educated mathematician like Turing, who was, because she was female, designated a linguist rather than a code-breaker. We can easily forget that in the time Joan was part of Turing’s life it was less than two decades since women had been granted the vote on equal terms with men in the UK (in 1928), and how at Bletchley Park during WWII women assisted men as ‘secretaries’, but were capable of a lot more if given the opportunity, which Joan Clarke showed she so obviously was. 

Times are better for women, but still not great – in the second decade of of the 21^st century the UK still has far fewer females populating the higher echelons of academia as University Vice Chancellors. Keira Knightly brings Joan Clarke out of the shadows into the light as a heroine herself and a role model for girls today. Thank you to Keira, for portraying Joan Clarke, not as a glamorous kitten in ‘The Imitation Game’ but with gracious simplicity masking an inner quality beyond beauty as Turing’s mind-for-mind friend.

Keira Knightley as codebreaker Joan Clarke

Benedict Cumberbatch. BBC’s Sherlock Holmes, Benedict was not that character as Alan Turing. Depicting the ‘confidant in his work’ mathematician, belief in ‘Turing as the codebreaker; and what the logician was doing, what was needed to be done at that crucial time and how to realise it in a not-normal way, pitting a machine against another machine by firstly focusing on getting a big machine built – was genius thinking. The film does not shirk from the fact that Turing was a homosexual, it’s ever present, but what the film does is not sensationalise that feature of Turing’s character. Alan Turing was much, much more than a homosexual man – he was a complex human being. This is what Benedict captures in his interpreting Turing, played brilliantly as a pioneer who challenged and risked to improve the world. Turing was not perfect, who is? Who wants to be? Turing was not normal; goodness the world needs more not-normals. The Imitation Game showed us that elegantly.

Finally about the film, there are scenes in the movie that I don’t recognise, or remember reading about in Andrew Hodges biography ‘Alan Turing: the enigma’, or his mother Sara Turing’s book, that the film presents as happening to Turing. It is unimportant as far as the concept of the movie goes – I recall a Greek colleague piqued that Brad Pitt’s Troy related Achilles killed inside the city, rather than what we’re  tuned to by the myth. Creativity in ‘The Imitation Game’ tells a great story of a dazzling intellectual, of the heroic Alan Turing who needs to be as well-known as Leonardo Da Vinci and Einstein. Thanks to Morten Tyldum's movie he will be.


YouTube 'Introduction to The Imitation Game BFI 2014 LFF gala screening':

YouTube 'The Imitation Game premiere, red carpet interviews at the 2014 London Film Festival':




Interviews of the cast of 'The Imitation Game', including Mark Stong here:

http://www.wltx.com/video/3828641267001/51325932001/INTERVIEW---Mark-Strong-on-the-film-and-history-on-Alan-Turing-being-at-Betchley-Park-at-The-Imitation-Game-Gala-Opening

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Readers might want to check the the 60th anniversary 'Turing on Emotions' 2014 special volume (5) with two issues of papers ranging from articles about Turing the man to Turing-related work in the international journal of synthetic emotions (IJSE), they include:

Film Theory and Chatbots. 5(1), pages 17-22

The Emotions of Alan Turing: The Boy Who Explained Einstein's Theory of Relativity Aged 15 1/2 for his Mother. 5(1), pages 23-30

The Turing Test: A New Appraisal. 5(1), pages 31-45

Feelings of a Cyborg. 5 (2), pages 1-6

Turing's Three Senses of Emotional. 5 (2), pages 7-20

The Social Psychology of Dialogue Simulation as Applied in Elbot. 5 (2), pages 21-30

See here for full contents list of IJSE Volume 5 issues 1-2:

 http://www.igi-global.com/journal/international-journal-synthetic-emotions-ijse/1144

 © Huma Shah 9 October 2014  - please note all images in this blog post have been taken from across the web

[NB: updated with YouTube clip and links]

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Update 23 November 2014

I've now seen The Imitation Game film five times (8 October and 8 November pre-UK release, then 16, 18 and 22 November), once with my boss and his wife.  W/E 22-23 November, the Turing story on film is sitting at number two in the IMDB Box Office after Interstellar - Chris Nolan's 2001: Kubrick inspired space adventure.

The more I see the Imitation Game the more I admire Turing-type characters who have such self-belief and confidence in their talent that they challenge authority with the nature of a child. The scene in the film where Cumberbatch's Turing roars "You people will never understand the importance of what I am creating here" reminds of every time 'authority' continues with its old ways regardless of how unsuccessful they may be, too weak to take the risk, too self-important to envelope imagination.