The Information - James Gleick [120]
One critic, Dennis Gabor, a Hungarian electrical engineer who later won the Nobel Prize for inventing holography, complained, “In reality it is the maze which remembers, not the mouse.”♦ This was true up to a point. After all, there was no mouse. The electrical relays could have been placed anywhere, and they held the memory. They became, in effect, a mental model of a maze—a theory of a maze.
The postwar United States was hardly the only place where biologists and neuroscientists were suddenly making common cause with mathematicians and electrical engineers—though Americans sometimes talked as though it was. Wiener, who recounted his travels to other countries at some length in his introduction to Cybernetics, wrote dismissively that in England he had found researchers to be “well-informed” but that not much progress had been made “in unifying the subject and in pulling the various threads of research together.”♦ New cadres of British scientists began coalescing in response to information theory and cybernetics in 1949—mostly young, with fresh experience in code breaking, radar, and gun control. One of their ideas was to form a dining club in the English fashion—“limited membership and a post-prandial situation,” proposed John Bates, a pioneer in electroencephalography. This required considerable discussion of names, membership rules, venues, and emblems. Bates wanted electrically inclined biologists and biologically oriented engineers and suggested “about fifteen people who had Wiener’s ideas before Wiener’s book appeared.”♦ They met for the first time in the basement of the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, in Bloomsbury, and decided to call themselves the Ratio Club—a name meaning whatever anyone wanted. (Their chroniclers Philip Husbands and Owen Holland, who interviewed many of the surviving members, report that half pronounced it RAY-she-oh and half RAT-ee-oh.♦) For their first meeting they invited Warren McCulloch.
They talked not just about understanding brains but “designing” them. A psychiatrist, W. Ross Ashby, announced that he was working on the idea that “a brain consisting of randomly connected impressional synapses would assume the required degree of orderliness as a result of experience”♦—in other words, that the mind is a self-organizing dynamical system. Others wanted to talk about pattern recognition, about noise in the nervous system, about robot chess and the possibility of mechanical self-awareness. McCulloch put it this way: “Think of the brain as a telegraphic relay, which, tripped by a signal, emits another signal.” Relays had come a long way since Morse’s time. “Of the molecular events of brains these signals are the atoms. Each goes or does not go.” The fundamental unit is a choice, and it is binary. “It is the least event that can be true or false.”♦
They also managed to attract Alan Turing, who published his own manifesto with a provocative opening statement—“I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’ ”♦—followed by a sly admission that he would do so without even trying to define the terms machine and think. His idea was to replace the question with a test called the Imitation Game, destined to become famous as the “Turing Test.” In its initial form the Imitation Game involves three people: a man, a woman, and an interrogator. The interrogator sits in a room apart and poses questions (ideally, Turing suggests, by way of a “teleprinter communicating between the two rooms”). The interrogator aims to determine which is the man and which is the woman. One of the two—say, the man—aims to trick the