  He suggested a range of ideas for systems which could be said to modify their own programs. These ideas included nets of logical components (‘unorganised machines’) whose properties could be ‘trained’ into a desired function. Thus, as expressed by (Ince 1989), he predicted neural networks. However, Turing's nets did not have the ‘layered’ structure of the neural networks that were to be developed from the 1950s onwards. By the expression ‘genetical or evolutionary search’, he also anticipated the ‘genetic algorithms’ which since the late 1980s have been developed as a less closely structured approach to self-modifying programs. Turing's proposals were not well developed in 1948, and at a time when electronic computers were only barely in operation, could not have been. Copeland and Proudfoot (1996) have drawn fresh attention to Turing’s connectionist ideas, which have since been tried out (Teuscher 2001).