Bringing Up Turing's 'Child-Machine'

Turing wrote that the "guiding principle" of his investigation into the possibility of intelligent machinery was "The analogy [of machinery that might be made to show intelligent behavior] with the human brain." (Turing 1948) In his discussion of the investigations that Turing said were guided by this analogy, however, he employs a more farreaching analogy: he eventually expands the analogy from the human brain out to "the human community as a whole." Along the way, he takes note of an obvious fact in the bigger scheme of things regarding human intelligence: grownups were once children; this leads him to imagine what a machine analogue of childhood might be. In this paper, I'll discuss Turing's child-machine, what he said about different ways of educating it, and what impact the "bringing up" of a child-machine has on its ability to behave in ways that might be taken for intelligent. I'll also discuss how some of the various games he suggested humans might play with machines are related to this approach. Keywords: Machine Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence, Analogy, Reinforcement learning, intelligence, Turing, education, child-machine, Turing test, game show, imitation game, computer, computing machinery, universal machine 1 A 'Guiding Principle' In his writings on intelligence and machinery, Turing often employs analogies. One analogy he states explicitly and calls the "guiding principle" of his investigation into "possible ways in which machinery might be made to show intelligent behavior" is "the analogy with the human brain." (Turing 1948) The analogy that Turing employs in the discussions that follow is not a simple analogy between machine and brain; it's more specific, and less physically-oriented, than the brief description of an analogy between computing machinery and the human brain quoted above might at first suggest. Turing says his investigation is mainly concerned with the analogy between the ways in which a human [with a human brain] is educated such that the potentialities for human intelligence are realized, and "an analogous teaching process applied to machines." (Turing 1948). That is, his investigation concerns identifying and evaluating proposals for filling in the part of the analogy that answers: if we want a machine to fulfil its potentialities for intelligence, how should it be "educated"? In his 1950 "Computing Machinery and + I should like to thank an anonymous referee for some helpful remarks, and the audience at the Fourth Regional Wittgenstein Workshop held at Washington and Lee University on March 11th, 2012 for discussion on this paper.