Author's rendition of a basic Turing test set-up. Sitting in between two agents (one human and one machine), a person needs to interact with both agents and determine (correctly) which is a machine.

One of the problems with a classic Turing machine is the tape must be infinitely long. [Mark’s] Turing Ring still doesn’t have an infinite tape, but it does make it circular to save space. That along ...

Do computers think? Some experts say yes, some say no. —Time magazine, Jan. 23, 1950 How do we tell whether a machine thinks? Much of today’s discussion of the matter starts with British computer ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine that someone gives you a list of five numbers: 1, 6, 21, 107, and—wait for it—47,176,870. Can you guess what comes next? If ...