Epstein Secrets

more complex than they first appear. They are infinite, yet there are different infinities, and they have meaning. The smallpox example above and the Turing numbers we will discover shortly suggest numbers do have meaning independent of culture and language. The next two chapters will show us what happens

away their secrets. The Enigma machine was an elegant compromise between a truly unbreakable code and a simple cipher. Unfortunately for the Germans, Turing was on the side of the Allies. In the 1930s almost all mathematics, accounting, and code-breaking were performed by humans using pencil and paper. I

at King’s College, Cambridge and was made a Fellow at only 22. In 1936 Turing, aged 24, published On Computable Numbers and their Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, not a snappy title, but one of the most influential mathematical works of the 20" century. The paper described the new the science of computing and

at they tend to favor or ignore. Surely (ding!)?, any man who could beat a woman at being perceived to be a woman would be an intelligent agent. What Turing did not foresee is the power of deep-learning AI to acquire this wealth of information in an exploitable form without having to understand it. Turing

the CIRL framework, one can formulate and solve the off-switch problem—that is, the problem of how to prevent a robot from disabling its off-switch. (Turing may rest easier.) A robot that’s uncertain about human preferences actually benefits from being switched off, because it understands that the human w

e. Turing contributed a fundamental model of computation—now known as a Turing Machine—in his paper “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” written and revised in 1936 and published in 1937. In these machines, a linear tape of symbols from a finite alphabet encodes the input for a compu

at they tend to favor or ignore. Surely (ding!)?, any man who could beat a woman at being perceived to be a woman would be an intelligent agent. What Turing did not foresee is the power of deep-learning AI to acquire this wealth of information in an exploitable form without having to understand it. Turing

the CIRL framework, one can formulate and solve the off-switch problem—that is, the problem of how to prevent a robot from disabling its off-switch. (Turing may rest easier.) A robot that’s uncertain about human preferences actually benefits from being switched off, because it understands that the human w

e. Turing contributed a fundamental model of computation—now known as a Turing Machine—in his paper “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” written and revised in 1936 and published in 1937. In these machines, a linear tape of symbols from a finite alphabet encodes the input for a compu