Assignment 1 for Spring 2023, some reading

Read this:
            Computing Machinery and Intelligence, by A. M. Turing
It is split into 7 numbered sections. Do not bother with sections 3, 4, or 5, they are really just trying to say what a computer is, you don't need that. Don't be fooled by sub-sections numbered (1), (2), etc., the sections you can ignore do not have parentheses around their numbers. When he mentions "valves", he is talking about what you would call vacuum tubes, the predecessors of transistors. The phrase "viva voce" means "in live voice", it refers to D.Phil or Ph.D. examinations at Oxford or Cambridge. By "scientific induction", he means (trying to) discover general rules from a number of specific observations. If he seems to be getting a little bit racist at some point, just remember that this was written in 1950, people had very different sensibilities back then.

Answer these questions:
  1. What has Extra-Sensory Perception got to do with anything? Do you think Turing believed in it?
  2. In 6(8) Turing talks about an "undistributed middle" in an argument, and says that it is glaring. What is that undistributed middle here?
  3. What is a "child machine"?
  4. What has the constitution of the United States go to do with anything?
  5. Ada Lovelace objected that a machine can only do what we tell it to do. What do you think of that objection?
  6. What does Gödel's (Incompleteness) Theorem say?
Your answers do not need to be perfectly right, there is opinion involved after all. But they do need to be properly thought out and written in proper English. Tiny little answers of just one or two words will not do, even something that seems to want just a yes/no answer needs some explaining too. But big essays are not wanted either. You need to show that you have done the reading properly.

Read the rules for submission posted on rabbit, but of course you are not expected to submit test runs for this assignment.