A Possible Evolutionary Neural Net Model of Turing's Child Brain

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A Possible Evolutionary Neural Net Model of Turing's Simple Child Brain

In 1950 Turing wrote a paper Compuing Machinery and Intelligence and suggested that one approach to building an intelligent system, that could play the imitation game, might be to start by simulating a child's brain.

“Presumably the child-brain is something like a note-book as one buys it from the stationers. Rather little mechanism, and lots of blank sheets. …  Our hope is that there is so little mechanism in the child-brain that something like it can be easily programmed.”

 While an enormous amount of research had been done relating to the brain and artificial intelligence since you will find nothing in the published literatureto suggest that Turing's hope was justified.

This paper looks at the archives of an early and very unconventional computer language, CODIL, which (like dozens of other experimental languages at the time) never became commercially viable. CODIL was designed to help a human user and a computer clerk work together symbiotically on complex problems where uncertainties made the conventional pre-define algorithm approach impractical. 

But the underlying mechanism supporting CODIL is very simple (like Turing's child brain), and could be a model of how information has passed from parents to their children for thousands of generation - making a very deep learning network. 

The assessment shows that CODIL could be considered to be a language for exchanging information between two neural networks - one the brain of the human user and the other in the computer.  This was achieved by handling information in a way that resembles human short term memory. In addition, because the human is providing the information in "network form" the computer does not need to use time-consuming trial and error learning, avoiding the learning problems of much A.I> research.

Because the work was abandoned in 1988 many of the crucial questions, such as "Could a CODIL-like model supporrt natural language?" were not examind before the project closed. As a result this paper looks ways in which the CODIL research relates to evolution of human intelligence.

Read the paper here

I would be very grateful for any comments you can make, with citations to any similar reseach I may have missed,  In particular I would be interested to know if you think the research should be restarted.