> I've heard that Alan Turing, a fantastic homosexual, failed to find a
> machine that could pass as a woman, sic, while thinking, in 1950, about
> what came to be called artificial intelligence. Is this fair to state
> publicly? Also, this informs transgender (TG) theory and queer theory
Turing's biographer explains that the Turing test (a machine is to be
considered intelligent if a human cannot distinguish on the basis of
written messages alone whether the author is human or machine) originated
in a parlor game, common in England and that turing played with his
friends. In the game, the group had to decide which of two writers
(hidden
from view) was the woman and which the man.
I worked with this link between the parlor game and Turing's
homosexuality in an article called
"The Miranda Warnings" collected in a book edited by George Landow,
__Hyper|Text|Theory__ (fyi).
What interests me about the example is the source of the test in the
vernacular of parlor games.
best
Greg Ulmer
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