All the Right Moves
While people in the world of books, as in so many others, continue to suffer from the dull and ecologically unsound deployment of artificial intelligence, the writer Richard Beard has got on with doing something defiant.
Mr Beard launched his Universal Turing Machine on June 23, the anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth. This is, in essence, a memoir; and the presence of the computing pioneer’s name in its title is a reminder of the well-known test Turing introduced to the world in 1950 as a means of distinguishing between human thinking and a machine-made imitation of that tricksy process.
Mr Beard calls his “machine” a “reading experience, not a game” – although it does start with a chessboard marked with years from 1967 to 2030, and invites the reader to choose a knight-like route around the board, from one year to another. This is a life story revealed at the rate of 1,000 words per year.
The full TLS article is available here.