I. J. Good Speaks on Machine Judgment at the Gaberbocchus Common Room

As described by Jasia Reichardt herself at Le Random (“The Ultraintelligent Machine and Gaberbocchus Common Room”), on January 14, 1958, the mathematician I. J. Good, a one-time colleague of Alan Turing, spoke at the Gaberbocchus Common Room in London.

Franciszka and Stefan Themerson had opened the club in 1957 in the Maida Vale basement of their Gaberbocchus Press so that artists and scientists could meet. Good asked whether a machine could make probability judgments. He imagined one built from partly random networks of model neurons, rewarded for a correct judgment with a chemical that lowered the thresholds of the neurons it had just used. Computers and Automation printed the talk in 1959. In a 1965 paper Good called such a machine "ultraintelligent." He wasn't far it seems.