Chapter 8 broaches our understanding of communication systems and their intimacy with strategic practice. Beginning with the general (strategist) Napoleon’s forms of communication–technological warfare and the subsequent reliance on innovation in communication devices, especially those of coding and decoding communications in military conflicts, we consider the workings and implications of electronic, digital computing systems for strategy. Via Alan Turing’s Imitation Game, we introduce the debate on the nature of intelligence, consciousness and conscience (self-awareness), setting the scene for an elaboration on the development from cybernetics to contemporary machine-learning algorithms in the subsequent chapter.

The excitement of cognitive psychology as a viable paradigm for contemporary research and application developed from a number of trends deeply imbedded in psychology’s past. In the twentieth century, these influences were clearly evident among the functionalists, the Gestalt movement, Tolman’s purposive behaviorism, as well as in the extended subfields of psychology, such as developmental, social, personality and clinical. In the latter part of the twentieth century, such specified advances as Bartlett’s schema theory, Hebb’s neural networks, and Broadbent’s filter model of attention provided cognitive psychology with substantive direction. The question of artificial intelligence contributed to a paradigm shift through the efforts of pioneers such as Turing and the logical theorist studies of Newell, Shaw and Simon, leading to what is described by some as the cognitive revolution. The seminal research of George Miller, Jerome Bruner, and Ulric Neisser gave cognitive science its form and substance. The question of the sustainability of the cognitive paradigm remains a topic for reflection.

The abnormal animal featured here is a breed of dog with extra toes on its hind feet. We also examine cats with extra toes, and we ask how the number of toes is controlled genetically. The leading theory for that was proposed 70 years ago by a math wizard, Alan Turing. His theory explains a lot of other types of patterns.

Computability is discussed here at length, beingthe prime example of what Gödel callsformalism independence in his 1946 Princeton Bicentennial Lecture. The emergence of the concept of human effective calculability and of its formal counterpart---simply computability---is traced in the work of Gödel, Chucrh, Hilbert and Bernays, and finally Turing. The reception of Turing’s work on the part of Church and Kleene as well as on the part of Gödel is chronicled.

We live in an algorithmic world. There is currently no area of our lives that has not been touched by computation and its language and tools. Since when, in the early 1940s, a small group of people led by John von Neumann gathered to turn into reality the vision of a universal computing machine, humankind is experiencing a sort of permanent revolution in which our understanding of the world and our ways of acting on it are steadily transformed by the steps forward we make in processing information. Such a condition is vividly depicted by Alan Turing in one of the founding documents of the quest for artificial intelligence (AI): “in attempting to construct machines … we are providing mansions for the souls.”1 Computers and algorithms can be seen as the building blocks of a new, ever-expanding building – a cathedral, to use George Dyson’s metaphor2 – in which every human activity is going to be shaped by the digital architecture hosting it.