Free Republic

The Bank of England unveiled the design of a new banknote celebrating mathematician Alan Turing, who helped Britain win World War Two with his code-breaking skills but is believed to have killed himself after being convicted for having sex with a male partner. The new 50-pound ($69) note features an image of Turing, mathematical formulae from a 1936 paper he wrote that laid the groundwork for modern computer science, and technical drawings for the machines used to decipher the Enigma code. The polymer note also carries a quote by Turing about the rise of machine intelligence: “This is only a...

The design of the bank note was unveiled before it is set to be formally issued to the public on June 23, Turing’s birthday. The 50-pound note is the most valuable denomination in circulation but is little used during everyday transactions, especially during the coronavirus pandemic as digital exchanges increasingly replaced the use of cash. The new note, which is laden with high-level security features, completes the bank’s rejig of its stable of paper currencies over the past few years. Turing’s image joins that of Winston Churchill on the five-pound note, novelist Jane Austen on the 10-pound note and artist...

Turing thought computers would advance to the point where they could win the imitation game most of the time by the year 2000, and he got that pretty much right. What he couldn’t have predicted was that political correctness would strip away so much of human identity, and make communication so awkward, that the millennial generation of humans would begin failing his test. It is very difficult to tell the difference between a Social Justice Warrior and a bot program based solely on their discourse. It would be a simple matter to write a program that searches the Internet for...