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New Intelligence Report

Edit: Ears

【New Wisdom Introduction】In 1953, Alan Turing and Christopher Strachey, the fathers of computers, created a love letter generator. Technology and emotion intersected through love letters 70 years ago.

In the early 1950s, the walls of the Computing Laboratory at the University of Manchester were covered with small, quirky love letters.

Love letters are common, but what is unusual is that these passionate love letters were written by cold algorithms, 70 years before ChatGPT appeared.

The history behind the love letters is even stranger. In 1952, long before Altman and OpenAI were even around, two students at the University of Manchester, Alan Turing and Christopher Strachey, basically invented AI writing.

Christopher Strachey wrote interesting programs for the Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first commercial computer, at the University of Manchester.

He entered words such as "dear", "affectionately" and "longing" into the program, which then randomly placed them into the letter template.

The letters were always mysteriously signed "MUC", which actually stood for the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester.

The program is also considered the first example of digital art.

When Strachey pinned his computer-generated love letter to a notice board at Manchester University's computer science department, colleagues were confused and amused.

His colleagues were stunned when he explained that the love letters were computer-generated.

In addition to creating an algorithm that could write gender-neutral love letters, Turing and Strachey conducted several experiments in artificial intelligence, including inventing a computer that could sing and writing the world's first computer game.

Turing＆Strachey

Turing and Strachey had been friends since their days at King's College, Cambridge, in the mid-1930s.

Turing was a graduate student working toward a master's degree in mathematics, while Strachey was an undergraduate also studying mathematics.

Turing was hailed as a young genius, invited to Princeton to complete his doctorate, and then recruited to the famous Bletchley Park to participate in the World War II codebreaking work.

In remembrance of Turing, the codebreaker of World War II, the UK issued a 50-pound Turing commemorative banknote

Strachey did not do well in school; his grades were so poor that he was not accepted into any graduate research programs, but he persisted in his studies.

Despite his initial academic difficulties, Strachey proved himself to be an excellent programmer in his later research and became one of the most creative and innovative computer scientists in the 1950s and 1960s.

By the 1950s, the friendship between Turing and Strachey had deepened and developed into a partnership.

They wrote letters to each other, and although many of them are now lost, they discussed programming issues and imagined the future of artificial intelligence.

Strachey would write to Turing to report on the progress of the ACE (Automatic Computing Engine) machine he was working on at the National Physical Lab.

This was the machine Turing had helped design before he moved to Manchester to work on the "Baby", the world's first stored-program computer.

JSTOR copy of the "Baby" or SSEM computer

Strachey was limited to the ACE machine he had access to at the National Physical Laboratory and needed a more powerful machine to run his computer games.

Turing therefore invited him to come to the Manchester Computational Laboratory to use the Ferranti Mark 1.

The Mark 1 was one of the largest computers in the world at the time, probably second only to the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps-funded ENIAC.

Recalling his first night in Manchester, Strachey said, “I sat in front of this huge machine, with four or five rows of twenty switches and other devices, and it felt like I was in the control room of a battleship.”

Strachey programmed the machine to play a song, and soon after, he wrote the code for the world's first computer game.

Tic-tac-toe was too simple and chess was too complex, so he decided to program a computer to play checkers. At the time, it was the longest computer program in existence.

Turing and Strachey shared a common passion for exploring machine intelligence. As they worked together day after day, their steps intersected because of their work and their spirits resonated because of their affinity.

For Strachey and Turing, algorithms were not all cold and heartless; love letters were a romantic measure of intelligence.

Can machines have emotions and think?

On 15 May 1951, Turing gave a short radio talk for the BBC Home Service entitled "Can Digital Computers Think?"

This was a question that both he and Strachey explored. In his lectures, Turing asked his audience to imagine a computer as a mechanical brain, similar to but not exactly like a human brain.

Turing said that computers can learn and can be trained, and over time they can develop their own unique intelligence.

He pointed out a particular difficulty: computers can only do what programmers tell them to do; they lack free will.

“Acting like a brain seems to involve free will,” Turing continued, “but the behavior of a digital computer, when it is programmed, is completely deterministic.”

To solve this problem, he proposed that computers could use a roulette wheel function to randomly select variables.

Then, by adding a little randomness, the computer appears to be able to create something original and new.

After listening to the lecture, Strachey excitedly wrote to Turing.

Strachey wrote that Turing’s radio lectures “stimulated me, and they fit in very well with my own ideas on the subject.”

In 1951, Turing and Strachey collaborated to program the Mark 1, creating the world's first computer-generated music - the British national anthem "God Save the Queen", "Beat the Black Sheep" and Glenn Miller's classic "In the Mood".

In a letter from the early 1950s, Turing and Strachey discussed training a computer like a parent might discuss a child.

They compared themselves to their mothers and developed an affection for the computers they were working on.

Still, they are troubled by the challenge of giving machines free will.

To be sure, computers singing and playing games are demonstrations of machines making choices, but those choices are made within a predictable range of options, that is, limited free will.

Human free will follows the same pattern, but the number of options is infinite.

Strachey took Turing's suggestion of using a roulette wheel to inject randomness and wrote the Mark 1's love letter generator using Turing's programmed random number generator.

This program randomly selects words to fill in the prepared templates. Although this is not completely free choice, the generated love letters can be said to be original.

Love Letter Generation Strategy

The love letter generator that Strachey and Turing created was actually very simple. They designed a template for each letter:

Generate names 1 and 2,

Repeat 5 times;

Randomly generate one of the following templates:

1. "You are mine" adjective, noun

2. "My" adjective (optional), noun, adverb (optional)

Verb, your, adjective (optional), noun

Generate "your" adverb, "MUC" (Strachey, "MUC Love Letter Generator")

The whole process is like a word-filling game, where the template provides the structure for each letter and then words are selected from the vocabulary to fill in the blanks.

The vocabulary contains a rich variety of sentimental, sweet and loving language styles, and the address options may include "dear", "thought of day and night" and "sweet".

The app allows for cute, neutral nicknames like "Dou Dou," "Baby," and "Sweetheart," and can choose from adjectives like "burning," "greedy," and "eager."

Verbs like “encounter,” “remember,” “guard,” “cling to,” and “ignite” infuse these clumsy, formulaic love letters with vivid desire and emotion.

Today, anyone can use Strachey's program to write love letters, and programmers' recreations have given us more insight into Strachey's original code.

The love letter generator developed by Strachey and Turing was not only a theoretical machine intelligence experiment, but also had unique personal significance.

For Strachey and Turing, writing love letters was a romanticized version of intelligence, foreshadowing a future in which computers might write original prose.

Originality is an important indicator of machine intelligence in their eyes, and they all want to know whether computers can create something that humans have never done before.

In Turing’s landmark paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” he listed “doing something truly new” as an important criterion for intelligence and praised the brains of machines, observing, “Machines frequently surprise me.”

In the article, Turing designed the thought experiment of "Imitation Game", which is later known as the "Turing Test".

Paper address: https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238

The letter is short but the love is deep

The love letter generator also has a deep meaning for the two men, because the two men were unable to express their emotions properly in the era of locked doors.

If Turing and Strachey couldn't express their desires publicly, they programmed computers to express them for them.

Two of the articles published by Christopher Strachey are as follows:

According to some sources, the same year that Strachey used Turing’s random number generator to create his love letter writing agent, Turing was indicted for “gross indecency” and faced jail time.

After being convicted, Turing agreed to receive hormone injections to avoid going to jail. Ultimately, after more than a year of so-called "treatment," Turing chose to commit suicide by biting an apple coated with potassium chloride.

Some netizens on Twitter also posted a comparison between the love letter generator in 1953 and the love letter generated by GPT-3 in 2020.

Love letters have obviously become longer and the language has become richer. 70 years later, machines have become more capable of conveying emotions through words, and people can express their feelings more freely.

References:

https://bigthink.com/the-past/love-letter-generator-turing-strachey-ai/

https://daily.jstor.org/the-love-letter-generator-that-foretold-chatgpt/