News from Writer's Rest

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

8 September

Lindsay's latest posting at http://writersrest.com/2012/09/06/pretending-to-be-human-the-latest-thing-in-robo-calls/#comment-1542 has enthused me to write this :


Ah, The Turing Test, one of the beloved things that returns and returns, and always pays returns!

I always had an interest in Alan Turing and his fellow theorists and code-breakers, and had been to the place that gave rise to the present GCHQ (the UK’s Government Communications HQ), but seeing the play about his life, brilliantly performed by an all-amateur cast, had me taking my then girlfriend that same weekend to that place in Buckinghamshire, Bletchley Park.

Turing’s sister (who calls him Alan M. Turing) has written a book about him, which I shall some day read, as I shall some day read the text of the play and be amazed again at how much the actor who played him embodied that role and knew a huge role almost word perfect.

For now, I see a little bit of his lively mind and thinking from the thirties and through and beyond the Second World War, and feel moved to support the campaign that he should be pardoned for being gay before his time, and also for his seeming suicide to be looked at not as the self-crime that it then was in law.


If that does not encourage you to visit Writer's Rest, I admit failure...


Plus there's now :

Another thing is that the best AI is where the money is being sought: it is not in the very unconvincing services that ‘direct your call’ by getting you to press 1 then 3 then 2, etc., etc., or the stilted automated announcements at the station, as they have no interest in conveying the notion that they are persons, just suitably comprehensible cut-up bits of persons’ voices.

Actually, that is no false economy, but not pretending to be any more than one is, whereas those who use highly developed AI fail to realize how objectionable people will almost always find a however-clever machine that rings them up, if they catch it out as one, and may have to learn a difficult lesson about what matters to human-beings.

The reason? Simply the same affront at a computer seeming to personalize a form-letter, but addressing me incompetently as Mrs Apsley, because of the principle rubbish in, rubbish out – the seeming care about me as this mythical ‘valued customer’ is belied by not even knowing who I am! Just as irritating as if the new doctor calls one by the wrong name, but he or she can be corrected, and should apologize…


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Turing tested

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

12 August

Turing tested

For Lucy


Can we can safely say
That, not having
An optical computer,
Alan Turing could have been
On the German side
Without a difference?:

The Allies had, not just him,
But secure code-books,
A machine that Axis hadn't seen
(Without Enigma's flaw),
And the Germans not knowing
Enigma and Lorenz cracked

So the Germans had their pride,
Relying on technology whose
Non-self-encryption
Left them more open,

And, never knowing the truth,
Could only have set Turing
A tougher task: to break
The Allies' code,
Probably not listening
If he challenged their
Self-assurance


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Not yet the festival

Saying that, to-night's special science showing of Enigma had all the hallmarks of the best festival events:

* A packed screening

* An introduction from the front

* A talk By Dr James Grime (pictured), infomed by a demonstration, about what we were about to see in terms of what the Enigma machine was, did and why it was important to decode its messages and who worked out how to do it

* The film itself, which was rather more implausible thriller - complete with the unlikely prodigious agility and speed of a Cambridge mathematician who did not look in shape - pinned onto the background of the workings of Bletchley Park than any meaningful story

* A chance to ask questions about the accuracy of details in the film, the set-up at BP, and the Engima machine, as well as to photograph it and even press a key and see a different letter light up, still working 75 years on!

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