It is not widely realised that Turing was probably the first person to consider building computing machines out of simple, neuron-like elements connected together into networks in a largely random manner. Turing called his networks

unorganised machines

. By the application of what he described as

appropriate interference, mimicking education

an unorganised machine can be trained to perform any task that a Turing machine can carry out, provided the number of

neurons

is sufficient. Turing proposed simulating both the behaviour of the network and the training process by means of a computer program. We outline Turing's connectionist project of 1948.
In Memory of Robin Gandy