Show Notes
I thought the Turing Test was between a person and a computer. But Turing’s paper seems to imply it’s between a man and a woman, and then a computer and a woman. So what really is the Turing Test? And is it a good measure of intelligence anyway?
Sources
Alan Turing: Computing Machinery and Intelligence, 1950 https://phil415.pbworks.com/f/TuringComputing.pdf
Gualtiero Piccinini: Turing’s Rules for the Imitation Game, 2000 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251383110_Turing's_Rules_for_the_Imitation_Game
Judith Genova: Turing’s Sexual Guessing Game, 1994 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02691729408578758
EDSAC: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EDSAC_(25).jpg
Jimmy Kimmel Clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=earRJKrE8Bw
EDSAC iPhone13 Comparison
EDSAC, from Wiki: “Cycle time was 1.5 ms for all ordinary instructions”
It looks like addition was one of the “ordinary instructions.”
“Numbers were either 17 bits (one word) or 35 bits (two words) long.”
My understanding is that 35 bits would take two operations to add, so I’ve stuck to adding two 17 bit numbers, which can be done in one floating point operation.
“The first calculation done by EDSAC was a program run on 6 May 1949”
From then to Christmas day 2025 is 27992 days = 2418508800 seconds
So the number of 17 bit numbers the EDSAC could add in the time period is
2418508800 s / 1.5 ms = 1612339200000
iPhone 13, from Wiki: The GPU runs at 1.37 TFLOPS (tera FLOPS), so 1.37 * 1012 FLOPS.
Let’s assume adding two 17 bit numbers takes 1 FLOP.
Then adding 1612339200000 17 bit numbers can be done in
(1612339200000 additions) / (1.37 * 1012 additions/s) = *1.176889 s.*
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