The apple has always had a certain importance in the history of mankind. There was the apple that Eve picked and Adam ate, and we have seen the consequences. There was the apple that fell on Newton’s head – an episode he himself liked to relate in later years – and we are now grappling with the enigma of gravity. There is also Alan Turing’s poisoned apple. Let’s stop here. Alan's Apple-Hacking the Turing Test by Valeria Patera examines the scandal surrounding this last apple and presents as an enigma the life, death and destiny of the man who did so much to decipher the Nazi Enigma code during the Second World War. But deciphering the meaning of life is much more difficult.
Patera counterpoints the human and scientific aspects of Alan Turing’s life with conversations between two hackers who, in their turn, question the meaning of what they do. They set the virtual world of the Net against the real world, composed of things and bodies, but also of institutions like the Inland Revenue and the Police. Here, as in Turing’s case, the focus is on diversity as opposed to standardization, extraordinary science as opposed to normal research, liberty as opposed to necessity. But what if the freedom dreamt of by those who surf the Net is actually a different kind of necessity? Besides, I remember one of the hackers saying at the beginning of Patera’s play: “I live on the Net, in another society, with its own rules, borders and traditions.” Exactly! Here we have another society, more rules and borders! We may also have the slight suspicion that the wonderful world imagined and desired by the hackers will turn out to be a Brave New World. Is there perhaps a test that would allow us to clearly distinguish the different kinds of freedom from those of necessity?
Turing’s own experiences show how difficult it is to make a sharp distinction between the two. Does science always signify intellectual emancipation, and technology “progress”? Then, why “are the Police so interested”? To what kind of freedom did Turing sacrifice the best years of his life? What kind of an open society is it that uses chemical castration to “normalize” those who appear to be sexually “abnormal”? And can machines be “better” than human beings, in every sense of the word? In constantly posing these questions, Patera cannot but use as a poetic symbol the Turing Test itself, which has become one of the most representative issues in the soul-body-machine, or if you prefer, the mind-brain-computer debate. A problem that has been with as at least since the time of Descartes. However it was abstract logic research (the Turing concept of computability) that truly revealed to us the Brave New World of the computer technology; the technological aspect (the programme known as Strong Artificial Intelligence) came later; moreover, it was brilliantly anticipated by Alan Turing Perhaps it is more than a historical irony that the test which is indissolubly linked to Turing’s name in specialist literature, was based on a gender test (designed to reveal if the hidden interlocutor was male or female). As well as ambivalent sexuality there is now an equally ambivalent human being. It suffices to consult the documentation on the results of the Turing Test. In the interesting volume The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul (1995) by Paul M. Churchland, for example, we read that in the course of many tests not one “machine” was mistaken for a human being by the “judges”, whereas many human beings were taken for machines (see Chapter 9 of the above-mentioned work). Perhaps it is not a question of asking ourselves if a machine can think, but of concluding that when we think we do so like “machines”.
Indeed, the hackers in Patera’s play give us to understand that, in some sense of the word, we are (also) machines. Extremely sophisticated machines, in fact, that have undergone a long evolutionary process. These machines are also known as bodies, and perhaps Turing’s error was to sometimes forget that he possessed a body and that simulated intelligence is also strongly conditioned by the physical structures employed. Nowadays, the Turing Test is usually criticized from two opposing points of view. According to some it is too narrowly-based, while others find it too broadly-based. In either case it is not able to adequately represent the kind of symbolic thought that is now considered one of the most significant products of evolution, firstly from a biological and secondly from a cultural standpoint. I would refer the reader here to the now well-known Chinese room argument by John R. Searle. Patera obviously does not claim to solve this philosophical puzzle in her play; but she intelligently implies that the symbol is the “death” of Turing’s research programme.
Symbols are important, in fact, as the anecdotes about apples show, and the one about Turing is a little like the apple (poisoned) in Snow White, the difference being that in Turing’s story there is no prince charming to awaken the sleeper with a kiss. In true Italian style Patera concludes her play with Alan’s mother saying: “I don’t believe it.”

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