Bletchely Park Slates 2009 Alan Turing Memorial Soiree

By Marc Handelman on May 28th, 2009

Bletchely Park

The United Kingdom‘s Bletchely Park has announced the 2009 Turing Memorial Lecture and Dinner, set for 2009/07/02. Presented by Professor Margaret Boden from the Centre for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex (and a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence). We deem this event a MustAttend if you are in the Milton Keynes vicinity on that date. More information referencing this lecture, and the dinner are noted after the jump. Happy Computing!

2009 TURING MEMORIAL LECTURE AND DINNER
‘Turing and Artificial Life’ – Thursday 2 July

Bletchely Park’s fifth annual Turing Memorial Lecture, ‘Turing and Artificial Life’, will be given by professor Margaret Boden from the Centre for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex on Thursday 2 July. The lecture will take place in the Mansion at Bletchley Park at 6.30pm, followed by dinner at 8pm. The cost is £52 per person (no concessions), including a reception, the lecture and dinner. This annual event aims to keep the memory of Turing’s achievements alive and make his work accessible to the general public.

Using computer simulation and robotics, Artificial life, or A-Life, is a way of carrying out theoretical biology and studying the characteristics of living things, including, self-organization. Although this field of study was named as recently as 30 years ago, A-Life was pioneered much earlier by eccentric British genius, Alan Turing, who was the first to use a digital computer to simulate self-organisation. He conceived the innovative concept in his last published paper in 1952 before his tragic death in 1954.

Turing is best known for his fundamental contributions to breaking German codes at Bletchley Park. Fellow codebreaker Jack Good summarised the importance of his brilliant ideas: ‘I won’t say that what Turing did made us win the war but I daresay we might have lost it without him.’
Turing’s groundbreaking research at the Universities of Cambridge and Manchester before and after the war trampled traditional academic boundaries, ranging from mathematics and logic to biology, philosophy and the study of the mind. The founding father of computer science, he was also the first to pioneer the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life.

Following a reception at 6pm, the lecture will take place in the Mansion Ballroom at 6.3pm, followed by dinner at 8pm in the newly restored Mansion Drawing Room.

Artificial Life

Turing showed how familiar laws of physics imply that interactions between diffusing chemicals, in an undifferentiated embryo, could result in waves and/or regions of differing chemical concentrations. These might then give rise to anatomical features such as rings of petals or tentacles, and stripes or dappling on surfaces. They might even (he suggested) guide the brain’s developing neurones to interconnect in certain circuits and/or regions. In short, physics results in morphogenesis (the development of form, or shape).

Today, a few (not all) A-Life researchers aim to develop “strong” A-life: virtual life in cyberspace. Turing’s physics-based approach can’t help them. But virtual life is impossible anyway, because of the need for metabolism. Metabolism is the self-organisation of a bodily unity by means of biochemical cycles of some (necessary) complexity.

Professor Boden

Professor Boden is a member of the Academia Europaea, a Fellow (and past Vice-President) of the British Academy, a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (and of the British and European equivalents), and a past Chairman of Council of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. She holds degrees in medical sciences, philosophy, and psychology (including a Cambridge ScD and a Harvard PhD), and three honorary Doctorates (from Sussex, Bristol, and the Open University). In the New Year Honours list of 2002 she was awarded an OBE “for services to cognitive science.” Her writing has been translated into 20 foreign languages, and she has given lectures, and media-interviews, across North and South America, Europe, India, the USSR, and the Pacific.