Generative Artificial Intelligence: As Big as it is, it is only a Program

We ignored the warnings from Mary Shelly, Thea von Harbou, Karel Čapek, and Colossus: The Forbin Project (1966) by Dennis Feltham Jones. The Hegelian dialectic predicts that the terror of the artificial human must have created its own contradiction and it did: the Apple Macintosh 1984 Super Bowl Commercial and everything it validated from Thomas Edison (“All I ask of my body is that it carry my brain around.”) to Alan Turing (he, him, G), Grace Hopper (0111), and the nerds of Silicon Valley. 

We made everyone a computer programmer. Some of us started earlier than others. We made it as easy as possible. 

For the people who never learned to program before, the user interface is as easy as a Google search or a Word document. Just ask. The program (measured against 1985) is an extremely large and complex compiler with a natural-language interpreter as the primary user interface. 

The Mercedes Maybach S 680 Brabus 
will not make coffee. It only does
extremely well what it was programmed to do.

The integrating truth which unites the two sides of the AI Dialectic to create the Synthesis which will result in a new Thesis, is that we all have been programming machines all of our lives. Aristotle never tuned a radio. Even given the wonderful opportunity, Plato would not get his hands dirty lubricating the powertrain of a steam engine. (Granted, there was Archimedes and it is a thin hypothesis that he built the Antikythera Device.) From learning to ride a bicycle, playing with Erector Sets, TinkerToys, and Legos and then learning to drive a car (and change a tire), we grew up interacting with machines.

I answered an ad from Murrary Resources, technical recruiters,
for a technical writer. "You do not look all that human to me,"
the human resources applicant tracking AI said to me.

A cogent comment on LinkedIn.
However, I replied:
"When the devil tempts you he will not come with fire and claws.
He will ask you to comprise a little bit just this once.  
Aaron Altman to Jane Craig in Broadcast News."
Because of Clippy, people stopped learning to write letters.

The Antikythera Device ran for a century or so, three lifetimes: created, admired, and never to be repeated. Scholars who study the device wonder and discuss whether and to what extent this was the work of one person. It has no simpler precursors, no antecedent subassemblies. The common informed wisdom includes the fact that this wonderful astronomical computer also, incidentally, was used to set the dates of religious ceremonies, which for the Greeks necessarily included stadium games. 

I ask: What if civic religion and social rituals were the purpose; and the path to that solution included the attendant abilities to track the planets? 

I suggest: It took a lifetime to build (three generations: one brainiac with minions), ran for a lifetime, and was lost in transport, falling into the sea for 2000 years. Would the loss of a single sword have benchmarked the existence of swords and how to make them? Many people could make swords. Not-many people built the Antikythera.

For 2000 years, the standard calculator was the abacus: no gears, no sundial, no pointers. It does have an accumulator and a register but no one ever called them that. 

GOSUB coffcoff. Despite their pretenses, programmers (now “devops”; formerly “data processing"), are just another class of users, like clericals and sales. They have other interfaces and presentations. Programmers will not tell you this, but they write with an “Application Development System” or “Program Developer Kit” which is a spellchecker for code. It is all colorized and color coded. If the programmer makes a mistake, the colors show that. Sometimes, the line itself will not accept an <Enter> if there is a bug on the line. That sure makes life easy. They now have “no code application development.” The programmers get to <quote> focus on higher level problems </quote> (ahem, coff-coff). RETURN.

Two hundred years ago, Charles Babbage built the Differential Engine and Lady Ada Lovelace programmed it. It took another lifetime for the world to catch on and catch up. The MIT “hackers” of the 1950s built model railroad switching systems from donated Bell Telephone racks. A hundred years ago, it had been suggested that in theory you could use your telephone to select and listen to a symphony orchestra in a distant city. 

Instead, we had broadcast radio—with commercials—an ethereal instantiation of newspapers, themselves an invention from only one previous century. 

Mathematicians complain about AI.

“First, it points out how AI models can “produce plausible but unreliable (or even incorrect) arguments which are difficult to distinguish from correct mathematical proofs.” Such developments put reviewers under increasing pressure and are “jeopardizing our ability to implement traditional standards for the correctness, transparency, and independent verifiability of proof,” the declaration warns.”

 — https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/mathematicians-warn-of-ai-threats-to-profession-as-industry-encroaches/

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/mathematicians-warn-of-ai-threats-to-profession-as-industry-encroaches/#:~:text=“Mathematicians should find it quite,College London, in a statement.

However, no one spoke out against human mathematicians when Andrew Wiles announced his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem on 23 June 1993 at a lecture in Cambridge titled "Modular Forms, Elliptic Curves and Galois Representations". As it was told in Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem by Simon Singh (New York: Walker, 1997; Anchor Doubleday, 1998), it was just another conference, but at the end of day one, the science journalists in the hall began calling their colleagues and by day three the place was packed. Andrew Wiles had proved Fermat’s Last Theorem. 

Or did he?

Again from the Singh work, closer inspection later by mathematicians at Wiles’s level revealed flaws in the proof. Wiles went back to work with a ream of white paper and a cup of sharp pencils. It took him three years. No one blamed him or his school or his parents. Instead, they gave him a medal. 

LET WORDS = 1024

The essential error in using AI (or a calculator) is seeking to avoid responsibility for choice and therefore not accepting responsibility for the consequences of your actions. Imagine that for an algebra class, you bought the instructor’s edition and copied out the answers to turn in for your homework. We recognize that as cheating. 

What if the book is wrong? Typos happen. The answer in the back can be wrong. A friend of mine had a math teacher who could not accept that the book was wrong. The kids did the problem correctly. Her book said that they were wrong. They met her after school (in the classroom, not the parking lot) and walked her through the answer. As it was told to me, the teacher refused to budge: the book could not be wrong. (She also called integers “intriguers”  perhaps indicating the challenge she found in high school maths.) So, AI can be wrong. Where is the surprise in that? 

Silicon Valley by Michael Rogers (Simon and Schuster, 1982).

"[Burt] Mathias is a self-made businessman who built the computer firm Solitron into a multimillion-dollar corporation. His college friend and partner, Alan Steinberg, is the computer genius of the operation, who explores the farthest reaches of computer intelligence while Mathias manages the finances. But Mathias stands on the brink of personal and professional ruin, about to lose both his wife and his business. To save Solitron from bankruptcy, he must gamble everything on whether Steinberg can perfect the first computer ever to simulate human consciousness. And once the job is complete, there is only one way to prove this remarkable ability to the incredulous world: the Turing Test..." (from the cover). 

As I remember the story, Mathias gamed the game by choosing as the human contestant, one of his own programmers, because who else would talk like a computer?

Big Bang Theory, NUMB3RS, NCIS,
Bones, Grey's Anatomy, replacing 
Leave it to Beaver, I Love Lucy, Lassie,
and Happy Days.

Clippy only does what it is programmed to do. The kids could prove their case, not just by working the problem but, had they chosen, via other paths. One of my physics professors, Dr. Alan Saaf at Lansing Community College, was answering homework questions at the blackboard. “I don’t understand number 3. …. How do you do number 5?... What equation do you use for number 1?...” He was going along and then he stopped. “You people would go out in the backyard and shoot hoops for 45 minutes and not make a single shot and still say you had a good time. How long did you spend on number 4? How many ways did you try to solve it?” 

There are over 300 proofs for the Pythagorean Theorem (one by Pres. James Garfield). The kids knew that the book was wrong because it contradicted known, provable truths. Clippy and Claude and the folk lack judgment.

This is an old problem among humans. In Computer Power and Human Reason: from Judgment to Calculation (1976), Joseph Weizenbaum warned of hackers whom he compared to compulsive gamblers. Driven by the superstition that one more patch will fix their problems, they stay up late, bleary-eyed and disheveled, working ever more frantically on a program they began without any reference to the substantive literature in the field in which they claim to be working. They are like gamblers who compulsively build complex rituals to control the game. 

Gamblers and Programmers

On the Cloudy Nights discussion board, which is mostly dedicated to chat about observational astronomy, in the forum for “Science! Astronomy, Space Exploration, and Others,” a topic title was the question “What can’t artificial intelligence do?”  The introductory post started: “We have made machines that can play chess better than we can. We are close to making machines that can write novels better than we can. Threshold question. Is there a limit? I can see no reason that there should be. The interesting question. What happens when we can make machines that can do everything better than we can?” In 100 replies, I was the only person who pointed out that while an AI could write a better novel, the novel itself was an invention. I received just one "like" for the comment. 

In a machine shop, there was a sign wrapped along the top of the walls: Good judgment comes from experience. Unfortunately, experience comes from poor judgment.  

For Cloudy Nights, I wrote: "(As far as we know) only humans can invent something new. You can say that an AI can write a novel better than a human, but the novel is an invention. As a form of narration and history, the novel is relatively recent. Poetry - epic poetry - was first. And before poems were invented, people made lists of things. ... Painting as we know it evolved in a series of quantum leaps. By the 4th century BCE graphical realism had achieved what we regard as modern techniques. The "Renaissance Masters" of Holland painted in a hyper-realistic style that violated "natural" vision. See The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan Van Eyck.  If you were in the room where the painter stood, you would not see the image in the mirror at the back the way it is presented in the painting. It is hyper-real. Impressionism, Expressionism, Abstract, ...  Performance Art.... That is the essential distinguishing characteristic that explains the difference between human intelligence and machine intelligence."

https://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2023/06/invisible-cheating-and-visible-rights.html

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The Antikythera Device

Turing Never Said That

“I think that sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.” The line is spoken twice, first by Knightley qua Clarke and then by Cumberbatch qua Turing. But they never said it. It should be attributed to a different genius, the screenwriter, Graham Moore.

I never accepted the quote as genuine, but it came up again when a colleague used it in their signature block. I wanted to warn them about that; so I did another Google search for an authoritative reference to debunk the false citation. I found the work of Sir John Dermot Turing.  

Dermot Turing – like his celebrated uncle Alan Turing – was educated at Sherborne School and King’s College, Cambridge. After doing a D.Phil in Genetics at Oxford, he concluded that scientific research was not for him, and moved into the legal profession. … His specialism was financial sector regulation, particularly the problems associated with failed banks, and financial market infrastructure.  -- More at https://dermotturing.com/about/dermot-turing/

In a blog on his website, Sir John explains: “Fake quotes - July 30, 2019 - We all know about fake news, but only recently I discovered fake quotes. I was asked where Alan Turing’s famous quotation ‘Those who can imagine anything can create the impossible’ had come from. After a lot of digging, the answer was ‘It didn’t.’ Not in his broadcasts. Not in his published papers. Not in his unpublished speeches.” 

The statement is insightful, powerful, and empowering. It deserves repetition and popularization. The author was Graham Moore. Moore received an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for his screenplay of Imitation Game. He understood Turing. 

“I had been this huge computer nerd my entire life. I went to space camp and computer programming camp. I was that kid. From a very young age, I knew about the legend of Alan Turing - among awkward, nerdy teenagers, he is a patron saint. He never fit in, but accomplished these wonderful things, as part of a secret queer history of computer science. And so I always dreamt of writing something about him, and I thought that there had never been a proper narrative treatment of his life, that he deserved. I by chance met the producers of the film at a party, and one of them told me they had optioned a biography. When I asked who it was, they said, 'it's a mathematician that you've never heard of.' When they told me it was Alan Turing, I almost tackled them, and I told them I'd do anything to write this film, I'd write it for free. It was all about luck and passion. That is how it started, and I felt that everyone else involved was just as committed to the story.” -- Graham Moore via IMDB at https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2441699/

 

Dermot Turing has developed an interest in his uncle’s work, publishing several books about the wartime projects at Bletchley Park. I bought two of them through Amazon UK. For myself, that was evocative on several levels. 

First, I am a globalist and I love global commerce. Unlike my conservative comrades who have fallen into the abyss of nationalism, I find an overarching  vista in Ayn Rand’s warnings against the Balkanization of western society. (See the Ayn Rand Institute here.) To be able to buy a product from across the Atlantic ocean with a few clicks is a tribute to human ingenuity in a open market.  

Second, my money was exchanged from dollars to pounds automatically and at a trivial cost. On the one hand a global society needs a global currency. On the other hand, an open market allows a plethora of monetary media. Friedrich A. Hayek called gold “the wobbly anchor.” (On NecessaryFacts here.) At the American Numismatic Association convention in Chicago in 2019, I spoke on the future of money and predicted a world coming soon with personal currencies. (See a version on Necessary Facts here.) During the Middle Ages, bankers rationalized the variegated fabric of local coinages with an abstract system of “pounds-shillings-pence”; and when they met at great fairs, using the new Arabic numbers and algebraic methods, they cleared their books without ever touching a coin.

 

Third, the transaction was secured with public key cryptosystems. Software agents shook hands and established trust in order to safely carry my money and order the transport of the seller’s product. 

 

A final note on Turing from Turing: “One scene in the movie which had puzzled me is the one where a young Alan Turing is pinned beneath the floorboards at his boarding-school and jumped on by his schoolmates. That’s bizarre, in many ways, not least because there is no evidence that Turing was bullied at school, and certainly none in Hodges’s book. Oho, it turns out that this scene is lifted from another book altogether – A Madman dreams of Turing machines, a novel by Janna Levin. So what started as fiction has been recycled as biography.” – Sir John Dermot Turing.

 

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Variations on Enigma

Verifying secret information is a challenge.  After enjoying the movie Imitation Game, I went to the library for books on Bletchley Park and Enigma. I found Enigma by Wladislaw Kozaczuk. Kozaczuk tells a story completely different from the one offered by F. W Winterbotham in The Ultra Secret.

I had read Andrew Hodges’ biography, Alan Turing: the Enigma back in the early nineties.  I am pretty sure that I read F. W. Winterbotham’s The Ultra Secret fifteen years earlier because it was sold by Loompanics Unlimited, who paid me to write The Code Book: All About Unbreakable Codes and How to Use Them. (On NecessaryFacts here.)

Discussing Imitation Game online, I read from others several twice-told tales that just were not so. I wrote several myself before I read Kozaczuk’s book.  I now regard it as the correct version – if the truth can have “versions.”

It is true that the Polish device for mechanically attacking the Enigma ciphers was called a “bomba.”  It was named for a large spheroid chocolate cake.  It was not shaped like the cake at all.  According to their story, it was only what they were having for dessert at a restaurant when they discussed the code name for their project.

 “The bomb was an electro-mechanical aggregate based on six Polish Enigmas, combined with additional devices and transmissions.  An electrically driven system of rotors revolved automatically, creating in each bomb, successively, over a period of about two hours (100-120 minutes), 17,576 different combinations. When the rotors aligned with the sought-for position, a light went on, the motors stopped automatically, and the cryptologist read the indications.   Thus, by setting in motion the bombs (six were built at once in November 1938), the daily keys could be recovered within two hours. “ (page 53)

 Mathematicians working for Polish intelligence had been attacking Enigma with some success for over ten years.  They had their own Enigma machines.  Built by reverse-engineering, they were variations on the commercial model. That was essentially the same foundation as the German devices that had been modified for military use.

Mathematician Marian Rejewski developed a theoretical model of the German Enigma. His work achieved realization in the construction of the Bomba.  That device depended on electronic elements created by AVA Radio Manufacturing, a small firm in Warsaw which had been working for their government since the firm was launched in the winter 1929/1930.

The story of AVA in particular and the Polish cryptanalysis project in general should be familiar to Americans today.  One of the founders of AVA never completed school beyond the fourth grade, but started out as an apprentice locksmith.  The company’s key to government work came via another founder who worked in the Cipher Bureau.  At heart, AVA was a small shop run by two brothers who were amateur radio operators.  After high school (“gymnasium” in Europe) they built and sold cheap little radio receivers.  But they were pretty good at their craft.

Also diligent were the young mathematicians from Poznan University: Marian Rejewsky, Henryk Zygalski, and Jerzy Rozycki.  (The book has a pronunciation guide up front:  Rejewski is “Rey EF ski”.)  Recruited specifically to work on German communications, Rejewski spent a year in Göttingen studying advanced statistics.  It was his judgment that Germany’s mathematics programs had fallen behind, and were not producing leading edge ideas.  Moreover, as would be borne out later, the German military did not trust mathematicians because they would get lost in theory instead of producing immediate results.  From our viewpoint today, that choice was evidence of the failure of their philosophical assumptions. 

By 1934, the Polish mathematicians and radio hams had collaborated to build four Enigma duplicates.

None of that appeared in Winterbotham’s book. Neither did Alan Turing have a place in the book.  In the movie, Imitation Game, Commander Alastair Denniston was portrayed as a martinet of limited vision.  Unfair as that may well have been, it is recorded independently (or at least repeated often), that Denniston considered Enigma to be unbreakable.  It is hard to find success at something you regard as impossible.  Nonetheless, Winterbotham gave Commander Denniston full credit for running the group—headed by Alfred Dillwyn “Dilly” Knox, who received one mention only—that broke Enigma.   

In fact, Winterbotham said of Knox that he was “quite young” when working at Bletchley Park.  Knox was born in 1884. He had been with the UK’s “black chamber” in World War I; and he is credited with delivering the decryption of the Zimmerman Telegram.

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A Successful Imitation of Alan Turing

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A Successful Imitation of Alan Turing

“Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.”  The take-away line from The Imitation Game states the theme.  The plot is the quest to build a computer that can decipher enemy communications and win a war.

 

Even with the Bombe, much work was done manually and brainually.
This grid shown in the movie is not the Banburismus of Turing.

Scholars complain about the historical inaccuracies. It is easy to do.  This is not a documentary. The film is a drama about one man’s achievement of what experts considered impossible.  That much is absolutely true. Commander Alistair Denniston held neither expectation nor hope for success.  The film dramatizes his disdain for the codebreakers. And it is drama, rather than the unemotional grinding out of intellectually difficult, yet ultimately routine, work. 

 

10,000 people worked there,
80% of them women.

Contrary to the movie, Joan Clarke’s team working on the Naval Enigma had early successes.  In the movie, by mid-1941 Denniston was not the only one enraged by Turing’s lack of progress.  In real life, by then, decipherment of Naval Enigma traffic allowed fleets to be redirected around U-boat packs. Lost tonnage shrank. But it is true that not all intercepts could be acted on. The Ultra Secret by F. W. Winterbotham (Harper & Row, 1974) broke that story long ago. 

Writing in Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age (Oxford, 2012),  B. Jack Copeland acknowledges that Cmdr. Denniston built Bletchley in the early years 1937-1939, though he proved unsuited to the task of managing 10,000 and getting their needs met by arguing for more money and more people. Also, it was late in 1941 when Turing and many others wrote to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, not Turing alone in mid-year. Such quibbles satisfy historians, but do not change the impact of the story.

You can buy a real one.
Some fetch a 6-figure price.
(They also sell replicas - and are not alone in that.)
http://enigmamuseum.com/

In real life, although the Turing-Welchman “Bombe” could and did reveal the settings of the Enigma machines, much of its output had to be checked by hand. In fact, Clarke and Turing spent long hours working together in Hut 8. They continued to do so after they broke off their engagement. And they met each other's parents after they announced their engagement. Turing apparently did not meet them before, as in the movie. 

Moreover, different than the portrayal, it was common for all of the cryptanalysts to continue work on the previous day’s cipher traffic until the next round of communiqués arrived.  They knew of stock phrases - such as ending each message with "Heil Hitler" - because that was long since a basic tool of diplomatic and military cryptanalysis: date at the top; "Your Excellency"; etc.

Turing called his manual labor “Banburismus” after the long sheets of paper made in Banbury.  But Turing called Clarke’s method “Dillyismus” after Dillwin Knox, the World War One cryptologist who revealed the Zimmerman Telegram.

 

Soon to be an eBook from
http://www.bletchleyparkresearch.co.uk

Before going to the theater, I intended to watch the film as a story in the abstract, not as a documentary.  That was very hard to do.  I read Andrew Hodges’s booklet biography of Turing when it came out in 1999.  (The film is based on his recent and greatly expanded biography, Turing: The Enigma; Princeton, 2014). Ahead of seeing the film, I researched Joan Clarke and wrote about her for the E-Sylum maillist of the Numismatic Bibilomania Society.  My research into her work continues. Having her numismatic bibliography, from an obituary in the BNJ, I submitted a proposal to the ANA.

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk

From Wired, “How Designers Recreated Alan Turing’s Code-Breaking Computer for Imitation Game,” by Angela Watercutter, November 21, 2014 here. 

"Turing produced the design for the Bombe, building on the design of the original Polish Bomba which had been produced by Marian Rejewski in 1938. The Bletchley Park Bombe designed by Turing, was refined by another Bletchley Park codebreaker Gordon Welchman and actually built by engineer Harold Keen who was based at the British Tabulating Company, not at Bletchley Park."

 

A snippet of what displays on
the devices given to visitors to
perhaps the most computerized park in the UK.

Among those who complain about the film is Dr. Sue Black whose blog is "Cheeky Geek" here.

In a scene stolen from the future,
a tank crushes an (empty) Tommy helmet.

A biography of Joan Clarke's work is this article by Lynsey Ann Lord which is extracted from a University of St Andrews honours project. (Clarke finished all three triposes examinations and qualified for an M. Sc. in addition to her B.A. in mathematics.  She received neither because Cambridge did not grant degrees to women back then.)

      

Joan Elisabeth Lowther Murray [nee Clarke] (1917—1996) cryptanalyst and numismatist is listed in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography here. 

Lord Stewartby (Bernard Harold Ian Halley Stewart), one of her collaborators in the coinage of Scotland, wrote the obituary for the British Numismatic Journal Vol. 67 No. 13, pg 162-167. (Online here.)  In 1986, Joan E. L. Murray was granted a BNS Sanford Saltus Medal for her research. 

He is not really Turing and it is not really his Bombe
but it was still a good movie.

The Secret Lives of Codebreakers: The Men and Women Who Cracked the Enigma Code at Bletchley Park by Sinclair McKay. New York: Plume (Penguin Group), 2012. (Originally published in the UK as The Secret Life of Bletchley Park (Aurum Press).) This retelling of the capture of Enigma wheels from the U-110 has some inaccuracies. The book says very little about Joan Clarke, though quite a bit about Mavis Lever (later Batey), who also worked on the Naval Enigma.

The Ultra Secret: the first account of the most astounding cryptanalysis coup of World War II – how the British broke the German code and read most of the signals between Hitler and his generals throughout the war by F. W. Winterbotham, New York: Harper and Rowe, 1974. This book broke the story. It is not from the viewpoint of Bletchley Park, and has no mention of Turing.

Engima: How the German Machine Cipher was Broken, and How it was Read by the Allies in World War II  by Wladyslaw Kozaczuk, edited and translated by Christopher Kasparek, University Publications of America, 1984 (Warsaw: Ksiazka I Wiedza, 1979).  Polish mathematicians had begun a theoretical analysis as early as 1932. The Turing-Welchman Bombe was an extension of the Polish Bomba; it was not Turing's universal machine.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Turing's Cathedral

BASIC: Turing's Truth

The Code Book

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