The difficult legacy of Turing’s wager

Describing the human brain in mathematical terms is an important ambition of neuroscience research, yet the challenges remain considerable. It was Alan Turing, writing in 1950, who first sought to demonstrate how time-consuming such an undertaking would be. Through analogy to the computer program, T...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of computational neuroscience Vol. 43; no. 1; pp. 1 - 4
Main Authors Thwaites, Andrew, Soltan, Andrew, Wieser, Eric, Nimmo-Smith, Ian
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York Springer US 01.08.2017
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Biomedicine
Brain
Brain - physiology
Human Genetics
Humans
Mathematical analysis
Mathematics
Models, Neurological
Nervous system
Neurology
Neurosciences
Theory of Computation
Policy
Alan Turing
Computational neuroscience
Philosophy of neuroscience
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Summary:Describing the human brain in mathematical terms is an important ambition of neuroscience research, yet the challenges remain considerable. It was Alan Turing, writing in 1950, who first sought to demonstrate how time-consuming such an undertaking would be. Through analogy to the computer program, Turing argued that arriving at a complete mathematical description of the mind would take well over a thousand years. In this opinion piece, we argue that — despite seventy years of progress in the field — his arguments remain both prescient and persuasive.
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Action Editor: Jonathan David Victor
ISSN:0929-5313
1573-6873
DOI:10.1007/s10827-017-0651-y