  A more positive feature of the paper lies in its constructive program for research, culminating in Turing's ideas for ‘learning machines’ and educating ‘child’ machines (Turing 1950b, p. 454). It is generally thought (e.g. in Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1990) that there was always an antagonism between programming and the ‘connectionist’ approach of neural networks. But Turing never expressed such a dichotomy, writing that both approaches should be tried. Donald Michie, the British AI research pioneer profoundly influenced by early discussions with Turing, has called this suggestion ‘Alan Turing's Buried Treasure’, in an allusion to a bizarre wartime episode in which Michie was himself involved (Hodges 1983, p. 345). The question is still highly pertinent.