I AM ALAN TURING
Wednesday Wisdom Presentation
CCAM

One day ladies will take their computers for walks in the park and tell each other, ‘My little computer said such a funny thing this morning!’

—Alan Turing (1951)

Composer Matthew Suttor, Professor in the Practice of Sound Design at the Yale School of Drama, along with a team of designers and computer programmers, will present a talk on their project, I AM ALAN TURING, an opera about Artificial Intelligence.

Their opera takes inspiration from Turing, himself, who famously cracked the German Enigma codes during WWII and invented the field of computer science. He prophesied the rise of increasingly intelligent machinery and advanced the Turing Test to answer the question “can machines think?” At age 41 Turing took his own life after being sentenced by the British Government to chemical castration for being gay.

Suttor and his collaborators have trained an instance of Open AI’s GPT2 natural language model, which generates synthetic text, on everything Turing wrote and read in his life. At their presentation they will demonstrate how they interact with this language model, which they nickname “Turing Reader’s Digest”, to generate the text for a libretto. It’s expression is uncannily Turingesque.

I AM ALAN TURING presents a new model for creating opera, drawing on cryptography, mathematics, artificial intelligence, and Turing’s own devastating story. Music and visual design is drawn from Turing’s fascination with natural patterns in the universe and from his notebooks archived at King’s College, Cambridge.

This opera brings together designers from Yale’s Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, computer programmers from Yale’s Digital Humanities Lab, and an international creative team that includes theater artists, musicians and coders.

I AM ALAN TURING investigates the limits of machine intelligence to understand what it means to be human in the age of information.