Paul Taylor

Paul Taylor writes: I am sympathetic to the view that lockdowns represent a failure of public health policy and wouldn’t want my piece to be read as an argument for the use of lockdowns in preference to any other instrument for controlling a pandemic. However, the UK had not prepared for this pandemic, did not respond well in the early stages and failed to implement an effective test and trace...

Ben Jackson wonders what impact AlphaZero, a computer program capable of teaching itself to play games at a superhuman level, will have beyond chess (LRB, 6 June). How many ‘real-world situations’, Jackson asks, ‘can be productively reduced to a process of optimisation, with a unitary goal and a predefined set of rules’? Deepmind, the artificial intelligence research company that developed...

In a future development that Tim Berners-Lee calls the Semantic Web, search engines will reason about a page’s contents, rather than relying on bibliometrics as they do at present. Currently, web pages are marked up with html tags that tell a browser how to display them. Tags in the Semantic Web will indicate what a site is about and be drawn from ‘ontologies’, specifications of the concepts...

David Runciman’s account of the injection of choice into the NHS doesn’t mention ‘Choose and Book’, a project intended to transform the process of allocating outpatient appointments. Instead of being put on a waiting list and subsequently given a date for an appointment, patients will be able to book appointments with the help of their GP, through a call centre or via the web. Not only will...

Most readers who enjoyed A.W. Moore's brisk demonstration that an arithmetisation of meta-mathematics produces provably unprovable propositions (LRB, 22 July) will have heard of Kurt Gödel, and some will recognise this as the work for which Gödel is famous. Without any mention of Gödel's theorem, however, Moore's article seems incomplete.