When Alan Turing was working at Manchester University, he was invited to join the Ratio Club, a dining club comprised of a mixture of biologists and engineers with an interest in cybernetics. There he was able to air and discuss new research and draw inspiration from an eclectic, yet extremely gifted group of individuals. Wired.co.uk examines the club and its influence on British science.
The Ratio Club was a group of young academics who came together to discuss cybernetics. It was founded in September 1949 by neurologist John Bates at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases.
The club gathered in a basement room below the nurses' accommodation and over beer and food participants would listen to a speaker, then have a discussion. The other members were a combination of neurobiologists, engineers, mathematicians and physicists and included Alan Turing. Professors were banned; anyone promoted to this position was supposed to resign their membership.
The aim was to keep the atmosphere informal and the discussion flowing.
Cybernetics is the science concerned with the study of systems and how they interact with each other -- be they natural systems or machines. The club met regularly between 1949 and 1955, with a final reunion meeting in 1958. Founder Bates believes that cybernetic ideas could be important tools for developing new insights into the nervous system.
The Ratio Club was noteworthy because many of its 21 members went on to become extremely prominent scientists. These included: - Horace Barlow, the great-grandson of Charles Darwin who has become an enormously influential neuroscientists specialising in the field of vision. - Thomas Gold, who became one of the most prominent astrophysicists of the 20th century and gave the first explanation of pulsars among many other contributions. At the time of the Ratio Club he was working in the Zoology department of Cambridge University studying the inner ear. - John Pringle was a leading invertebrate neurobiologist and was the first scientists to get recordings from single neurons in insects.
He went on to become professor of zoology at Oxford University. - Albert Uttley, who researched radar and automatic tracking during WWII. He later became the head of the Autonomics Division at the National Physical Laboratory where he researched machined intelligence and brain modelling. Later he became Professor of Psychology at Sussex University. - William Grey Walter was a world leader in EEG research, discovering the theta and delta brain waves and developing the first EEG brain topography machine. When he wasn't researching EEG, he was developing the world's first autonomous mobile robots, called Elmer and Elsie, which he used to study ideas about brain function.
Many of the club members were interested in developing brain-like devices as a means to either understand biological brains or develop machine intelligence. As a result the conversation tended to focus on the mechanisation of the mind.
Most Ratio talks provided an opportunity for members to discuss their current research. Turing led three different talks. His second talk on Educating a Digital Computer, which took place on 7 December 1950, introduced the Turing Test and focused on how intelligent machines might be developed. Turing suggested using adaptive machines that could learn over their lifetime.
Turing's third talk at the club, in February 1952, described his then unpublished work on reaction-diffusion models of morphogenesis. This launched him into new directions of theoretical biology and was incredibly influential in the field of computer modelling.
It was through Turing's communications with fellow Ratio Club members that he expressed his interest in using a computer such as the ACE to study the brain. In a letter to psychiatrist William Ross Ashby, he said: "In working on the ACE I am more interested in the possibility of producing models of the action of the brain than in the practical applications of computing."
The club had run its course by the summer of 1955, a year after Turing had died from cyanide poisoning after having been chemically-castrated. By that point many of the members' research had been recognised internationally and cybernetics had become a respected discipline.
You can find out more about the organisation in The Ratio Club: A Hub of British Cybernetics, by Phil Husbands and Owen Holland.
Read more: Celebrating Alan Turing's centenary