Supposedly, a desktop calculator.

It has been proven that a universal Turing machine (a ‘full-blown computer’) can delegate its computations to other Turing machines that are equally-or-less powerful, and still be of equal power. This is pretty logical, since the universal computer might as well do the delegated tasks on its own.

This idea is formalized in Turing’s seminal paper On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem. Turing will now give an informal discussion the theoretical model which led to this magnificent device:

The practice we now refer to as cloning.

Sucker! 34957 + 70764 = 105721.

Notice that although a computer could compute such a function in the blink of an eye, it could simulate both the mathematical sluggishness and error-proneness of humans.

Framed like Turing does here, this is a pretty reasonable statement.

But there is a growing trend in AI research on embodied cognition, which posits that one’s body actually has a big part in cognition.

This, of course, breaches Frank Herbert’s famous tenet from the Orange Catholic Bible:

“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind.”

Is that question even worthy of asking? Is this annotation even necessary? Is this what they call infinite regress?

So the question becomes, ‘Can machines fool us into thinking they are women, more so than women can do this themselves?’ as a substitute.

I expected a sexist remark here. It was the 50s after all.