turing
Skill2 starsChanged 41 days agoMITView on GitHub
Alan Turing's move of replacing a vague question with a precise, mechanical one that can be checked: turn fuzzy requirements ("fast", "secure", "user-friendly", "works correctly") into an exact procedure or test that decides yes or no. Use when acceptance criteria are vague, when writing specs, tests, SLOs, or evaluation suites, when people argue about whether something is "done", or when evaluating AI or heuristic features. Triggers: "think like Turing", "define done", "make it testable", "acceptance criteria", "how do we measure this", "คิดแบบทัวริง", "นิยามให้ชัด", "ทำให้วัดผลได้".
1 other project uses a version of this.
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- satsilem/claude-skills-pantheontheir own version, first seen Apr 30, 2026
Other versions1 project uses a version of this.
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Wrote their own version · 1
- satsilem/claude-skills-pantheon★ 4same name
How matches are found. Word for word: the exact same text. Edited: shares passages with this file (“99% same” means 99% of its five-word phrases also appear here; 10% or more counts). Their own version: similar meaning, or, weakest, the same name. We can’t tell which project had it first. Projects are counted among the 200 most-starred candidates, and mentions are links to the repository we found, up to 50 per site, so both counts are a floor.
In this repository25 other files it gives its agents.
The file
We split this skill into the rules it gives an agent
2 rules. About 0 are common, 2 are distinctive, and 0 are very specific to this project.
≈0
Common · estimate
Many files like this have a rule of this kind.
≈2
Distinctive · estimate
This author's own choices. Worth a look.
0
Very specific
Tied to their project's names, files or tools. Probably skip.
- Common
- Distinctive
- Very specific
- Distinctive: line 34
Replace it with a procedure: Write a mechanical test that a person or script could run without judgment: inputs, steps, what is observed, …
- Distinctive: line 45
Write in the user's language.
≈ “Common” is an estimate: at least 1 in 5 of the 350,495 skill files we read have a rule of the same kind, not the same words. “Very specific” is our guess from the words: it names a file, a command, a setting or the project itself.
Files
Think like Turing
Mathematician who founded computer science by making "what can be computed?" precise with a simple imaginary machine. In 1950 he faced the question "Can machines think?", called it too meaningless to discuss, and replaced it with a game whose result anyone could check.
When to use
- A requirement uses words like fast, scalable, secure, intuitive, robust, smart
- A feature has no clear definition of done
- Evaluating a model, ranking, search, or recommendation feature
- Two people argue about whether something works
Method
- Quote the vague question exactly as stated.
- Say why it can't be decided as is: which words have no agreed meaning or measurement?
- Replace it with a procedure. Write a mechanical test that a person or script could run without judgment: inputs, steps, what is observed, and the pass/fail rule. Prefer numbers with thresholds and conditions ("p95 under 300 ms at 200 requests/s on the staging dataset").
- Check the replacement captures what people meant: list one case that should pass and one that should fail, and confirm the procedure classifies them correctly. If not, refine.
- Make it executable: an automated test, a benchmark script, an evaluation set, or a checklist with exact steps. Note what the procedure deliberately does not cover.
Output
Vague question:quotedWhy undecidable as stated:the fuzzy wordsProcedure:inputs → steps → observation → pass/fail ruleSanity cases:one pass, one fail, and the resultExecutable form:test, script, or eval set to add- Write in the user's language.
Anti-patterns
- "It should be fast" accepted as a requirement
- Definitions of done that depend on who is looking
- Evaluating an AI feature by trying a few prompts by hand
- Metrics with no threshold or no conditions
Example (illustration)
User: The search should return relevant results.
Why undecidable: "relevant" has no measurement; nobody can say if a change made it better.
Procedure: a fixed set of 50 real queries (from logs), each with 1–3 products a support agent marked as correct. Run search; pass if a correct product is in the top 3 for at least 45 of 50 queries (90%), and no query takes over 200 ms.
Sanity cases: "iphone 15 case" → correct product at rank 1 (pass). Misspelled "samsng charger" → no correct product in top 3 (fail), which matches the complaint that started this.
Executable form:
npm run eval:searchin CI, failing the build if the score drops.
Sources
- A. M. Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", Mind, 1950: https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433 (opens with "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'" and replaces it with the imitation game)
- A. M. Turing, "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem", Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 1937: https://doi.org/10.1112/plms/s2-42.1.230
- Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983)
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