If you read one piece on early computer scientist Alan Turing that’s come out in celebration of his 100th birthday last Saturday (if you were wondering about Friday’s Google Doodle) you might do very well to make it this one in the Atlantic on how his reading of Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution influenced his work and continues to shape the way we work with computers. It’s also about the limits of artificial intelligence.
Competence without comprehension
“Knowing Suarez is difficult”
Recommended Reading: Wright Thompson’s profile of Luis Suárez will make you want to drop everything you’re doing and travel to Uruguay and work as a sportswriter.
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Reclaiming the Allegory
Recommended Reading: On the literary tradition of the allegory and what it means for modern storytelling. Staff writer emeritus Emily Colette Wilkinson writes on The Dark Knight as political allegory.
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The Pandora of Books
In The Atlantic, Johnathan A. Knee writes about how curation and aggregation can be more profitable than content creation. That is the idea behind BookLamp, a new search engine based on books' content and writing style, not sales data. “At times, being able to ignore the marketing data can be good for the recommendation,” explains CEO Aaron Stanton.