I. J. Good

British-born statistician, a prolific Bayesian, whose career began in wartime codebreaking: as a young cryptanalyst under Alan TuringAlan Turing, prop. n.: A British mathematician who worked out what computers can do in principle, helped break German codes in the Second World War, and proposed the best-known test of machine intelligence. at Bletchley Park he attacked the German Enigma cipher, and he later worked on the Lorenz teleprinter cipher. Building on an idea of Turing's from that work, he published Good–Turing frequency estimation (1953), a way to estimate the probability of events never yet observed that was later widely used to smooth n-gramn-gram model, n.: An early type of language model that predicts the next word from just the few words before it, using counts of how often each word followed those words in a large collection of text. language modelslanguage model, n.: A system that has learned how likely different sequences of words are, so it can predict the next word in a text and, by doing that repeatedly, write text of its own.. After posts at Manchester, the British signals agency GCHQ and Oxford, he moved to Virginia Tech in 1967. His essay 'Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine' (1965) defined an ultraintelligent machineultraintelligent machine, n.: I. J. Good's 1965 name for a machine smarter than any person at every kind of thinking, which could therefore build machines smarter than itself. as one that surpasses all human intellectual activities and argued that, since designing machines is one of them, it could design better machines, producing an intelligence explosionintelligence explosion, n.: The idea that once AI gets good enough at improving AI, each smarter version could build a smarter one faster still, so abilities would snowball far beyond human level in a short time.; hence 'the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make'. He advised Stanley Kubrick on '2001: A Space Odyssey'.