Turing lecture to the London Mathematical Society
Turing told a mathematical audience that a machine should learn from experience, and that a machine expected to be infallible cannot also be intelligent.
Why it matters
This is the earliest known public talk describing a computing machine as something to be taught rather than only programmed.
Turing asked for fair play for the machine: judge it as a mathematician is judged, after training and with room to err. A chess victory won from instruction tables written by hand he would not have thought significant. He offered chess instead as a limited field in which a machine could adapt itself to human standards, since the opponent's moves give it contact with people. The typescript, dated 20 February 1947, stayed unpublished for decades and became available in collected editions, among them the Carpenter and Doran volume of 1986.