---
title: "Intelligent Machinery"
authors:
  - "Alan M. Turing"
year: 1948
venue: "National Physical Laboratory report (published later in Machine Intelligence 5, 1969)"
arxiv: null
doi: null
source: "https://www.npl.co.uk/getattachment/about-us/History/Famous-faces/Alan-Turing/80916595-Intelligent-Machinery.pdf?lang=en-GB"
topics:
  - ai
  - unorganized-machines
  - turing
  - learning
seed_rank: 520
seed_batch: "foundations-greats-2026-08-13"
reviewed: "2026-08-13"
pool: "agents"
relevance_score: 9
lineage: foundations-of-computing
cites:
  - title: "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"
    url: "https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433"
    year: 1950
    arxiv: null
    doi: "10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433"
  - title: "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity"
    url: "https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02478259"
    year: 1943
    arxiv: null
    doi: "10.1007/BF02478259"
  - title: "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem"
    url: "https://doi.org/10.1112/plms/s2-42.1.230"
    year: 1936
    arxiv: null
    doi: "10.1112/plms/s2-42.1.230"
  - title: "Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine"
    url: "https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262730099/cybernetics/"
    year: 1948
    arxiv: null
    doi: null
see:
  - "519-computing-machinery-and-intelligence"
  - "565-a-logical-calculus-of-the-ideas-immanent-in-nervous-activity"
  - "515-on-computable-numbers-with-an-application-to-the-entscheidun"
  - "561-cybernetics-or-control-and-communication-in-the-animal-and-t"
---

# Intelligent Machinery

## One-sentence takeaway

Turing's 1948 NPL report treats intelligence as the education of "unorganized machines"—randomly connected networks trained by pleasure/pain interference—two years before the Mind essay.

## Why it matters here

Shows Turing's AI program as engineering plus learning, not only the Imitation Game. Anoptic agents and simulation stacks sit closer to this report (networks, reward, discipline of a child-machine) than to the later popular "test."

## Key ideas

- Unorganized machines are randomly wired networks of neuron-like elements, in the McCulloch–Pitts grain.
- Pleasure and pain signals interfere with the wiring so the net can be educated rather than fully programmed.
- Answers the usual objections to machine intelligence already, in internal-report form.
- Circulated at NPL in 1948; first formal book publication is *Machine Intelligence* 5 (1969).

## Caveats

## Links

- NPL PDF: https://www.npl.co.uk/getattachment/about-us/History/Famous-faces/Alan-Turing/80916595-Intelligent-Machinery.pdf?lang=en-GB