Lord Turing

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Stephensonia

something appropriately clinky and clangy with chains....

Community Entry: Lord Turing

Lord Turing is obviously a fictional reference to World War II hero-cryptanalyst and mathematician, Alan Turing. In the novel, we see Princess Nell captured by clockwork armored men who operate off of programs written in chains, which appropriately replicate the sort of tape programs that Alan Turing referred to in his Comp Sci papers discussing potential to solve the question of computability in artificial intelligence which had been sitting around since Hegel.

The argument is essentially that any finite state problem is ultimately computable and therefore deterministic on a finite computer tape. The problem of natural intelligence and free will enter the picture with the assumption that free will demands either infinite possible states or otherwise unpredictability in which state may be the answer at any given time, both of which are impossible with any computer that can only compute a finite number of states.