Module 4 – Evaluating the Web

Computing Machinery and Intelligence
A.M.Turing
http://www.abelard.org/turpap/turpap.php
published on http://www.abelard.org/ by permission of Oxford University Press.

This is a reliable site which contains the same article as a number of other sites. Abelard.org is a public education site whose mission statement reads “to advance rational education…this site is designed to provide the tools for the spread of sanity in education and culture”. The particular page that displays the article by Turing was originally published by Oxford University Press on behalf of MIND (the journal of Mind Association), vol LIX, no. 236, pp.433-60, 1950.

A.M.Turing has been cited thousands of times in relation to discussions on computing machinery and intelligence. Turing uses the article to put forward a way of deciding about computer intelligence and paves the way for future generations of computers to be tested for the ability to think. Turing has been classed as the “Founder of computer science, mathematician, philosopher, codebreaker, strange visionary…” among other things. He Worked at Bletchley Park in the UK during WWII as a code breaker, broke the Enigma code, and was then instrumental in breaking the “updated” Enigma code. He was fascinated by the idea of building a brain, and was ostensibly the forefather of the modern digital computer.

This site was produced for the purpose of research – to enable Turing’s article to be freely accessed by others who are researching various avenues of computing and those who are interested in reading about the description of a computer test to show if a computer can think or not. This was an early article (probably the first) on Artificial Intelligence.

1. In terms of your own future use, which 'body ' of information (ie. the original 'snapshot' of the site, or your own, annotated, analytical version) would be most useful to refer back to?

The original site that I used to get this information (http://www.abelard.org/turpap/turpap.php) is specifically an education site. It has a transcript of Turing’s original article. If I hadn’t already known about the Turing test, I may not have even gone to this site. There are other sites that link into this site, one of which discusses prizes for the first computer whose responses were indistinguishable from a human's and for the most human-like computer each year (http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html. Because the prize and the test are based directly on Turing’s original article, there is a link in the site that goes to another copy of the original article (http://loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html). I used the title of this article to find the article published by abelard, and to ensure that both were the same article (abelard is deliberately spelled entirely in lowercase as stated in the website).
In terms of my own future use, I would probably rely on abelard’s site, because I now know what it is about.

2. In term of external users (i.e. if you included this site as a hyperlink or resource on a website) which body of information would best help them judge if the site was useful or of interest to them?

In the term of external users, my description of the article may be of more use to them, because it doesn’t just jump straight into the article, it is a brief description of what the article is about, who the author was, and what site it can be found on.