LIBERATE ME!

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I'm seein' ROBOTS passin' by every day

For better or worse, I think robots are pretty cool, and some of the coolest ones out there are heart thumpingly, jaw droppingly siiiiiiiiiiiiick... They inspire awesome visions of the future, as though the rise of the machines has come and it's time we humans hung up our boots and went to live in caves, leaving all the tricky stuff to the machines. You know, the simple life.

But every now and then a piece of news- reassuring or deflating, depending on your outlook, comes along, and reminds you of what you knew ever since you were 6 and could never get that final Monkey island floppy to load, computers are FUCKING RUBBISH! I feel sorry for science fiction, as it waits patiently, drumming its fully articulated fingers for real science to catch up.

All this a propos of the fact that the Turing Test has been failed again. The Turing test? A simple benchmark test for artificial intelligence where a human judge enters into a text-based conversation in real language (think AIM without the lame smileys) with two mystery conversators (as Biggie might say) one of whom is a fellow human, the other a computer. If 30% of our judges fail to correctly identify the computer, we have a victory for the robots.

Doesn't sound too hard, right? But in 50 years and many attempts, it's never been broken, and by the sounds of things we still have a long way to go.

Sounds like I don't have to pack my AK and head off for Tora Bora just yet.

Robots 2.0

(Due to my inccompetence this appears before the first article on Robots, so just imagine that given the technological subject matter, like Professor Branestawm's clock that he 'forgot to put a wiggly thing in,' I cannot keep up with myself. Such is the life of the prolific scribe.

Anyway... perhaps not strictly robots, but by way of AI, back to the Turing test. Like many people probably I'd heard of the Turing test. I knew it was something to do with computers, no more than that, and I'd certainly never paused to give any thought at all to the guy who gave the test its name.

Of course not, why would you? But behind the Cholmondley Warner exterior of Alan Turing, logician, mathematician and cryptographer, lies a very wriggly can of worms, and a quintessentially English tragedy (can you be quintessentially anything else?)

Cryptographer, yes. Turing was a hero of Bletchley Park, and was the head of the unit responsible for cracking the deliciously fiendishly, Nazi-ly difficult Enigma code, which as we all know, took their U-boats out of the game and put the right kibosh on Fritz at sea. Britannia rules the waves.

So, that settles it. Turing was feted as a war hero, and they all lived happily ever after, baby booming like rabbits somewhere in the home counties. Right? Wrong. You see the truth is that Turing just happened to be gay. In post-war Britain. Oh-oh. After an ex-lover burgled his house and he reported it to the Po-Po, he got caught, and prosecuted. "A fine way to treat someone possibly responsible for saving thousands of British lives m'lud," you might say, but the law's the law.

Now in those days homosexuality wasn't just a crime, it was a mental illness, and the convicted Turing had the choice between porridge and hormone treatment to reduce his libido. Being a sensitive sort he popped for the latter and they pumped him full of estrogen for a year. One side-effect was gynecomastia (he grew tits). He obviously lost his security clearance and most of his colleagues and friends.

Unfortunately he resorted to self-toppage. Ja know how he did it? He ate an apple laced with cyanide. Some said he did it to make it look like an accident, others because Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was a personal obsession. Personally, I don't think you can rule out foul play. Some kind of super lo-fi Litvinyenko shit.

Remembered? Well there's always the test to which he graciously gave his name. And the statue in Manc. But though it is an oft-denied theory, I personally like to think that today you can see Turing memorialized daily. In every trendy new media office and hipster coffee shop you walk into, there it is, gazing back at you knowingly over your mocha locha frappuccino with extra sprinkles. To Jobs and co; Thanks for repping Alan lads.

RIP Babcia

Just off the A24, in the London borough of Sutton, where sprawling suburbia just begins to give way to the Surrey stockbroker belt, sits an innocuous red-brick bungalow. Fronted by a small car park, shrink-wrapped with well-kept hedgerows and flowerbeds, that bungalow is St Raphael's Hospice. And this morning, in that hospice, my grandmother died.

In her prime Anna Frenkiel was a mulier fortis in the old tradition, a force to be reckoned with, but the blade of even the sharpest old battleaxe loses its glint eventually, and today her body gave up on her.

Babcia will be mourned by the handful of friends who survive her, and by her family. A link has been cut, a tie to the past severed. I imagine her funeral will be in the same Wimbledon church where we said goodbye to her husband, my grandfather, and we will certainly be burying her next to him. I will be missing her.