Alan Turing, a British mathematician and cryptographer, is considered the father of computer science. He broke the Nazi German Enigma code during WWII and formulated ideas like the Turing machine and Church-Turing thesis. The latter states that any algorithm can be run on a Turing machine, which can theoretically compute any algorithm given enough time and storage space. Turing also formulated the Turing Test for determining artificial intelligence. He died in 1954, possibly by suicide due to persecution for homosexuality.
Alan Turing (1912 – 1954) was a British mathematician, logician and cryptographer considered by many to be the father of computer science. His contributions to breaking the Nazi German Enigma code during World War II were seen as vital to the Allied war effort. Alan Turing formulated multiple ideas that now underpin computer science and computability theory, such as the idea of a Turing machine or the Church-Turing thesis.
A Turing machine is a simple mathematical construct that can be thought of as a recordable tape of infinite length coupled to a mechanical unit with read/write capability. The unit can only perform three actions; read some of the tape and return the result; write a little on the tape; or delete a pre-existing bit. Turing’s Church-Turing thesis, formulated with Alonzo Church, states that such a Turing machine can theoretically compute any algorithm given enough time and storage space. He also claims that any practical model of computation must be a type of Turing machine. By extension, this means that the human brain can be called a Turing machine, because it processes information the only way information can be processed; reading, writing and manipulating memory fragments.
The Church-Turing thesis further states that any algorithm can be run on anything that qualifies as a Turing machine. Turing helped formulate the original definition of an algorithm, which is approximately as follows: 1) an algorithm will consist of a finite set of precise instructions to execute; 2) be computable in a finite number of steps (the inability of a program to determine whether or not it can be executed in a finite number of steps is called a “stopping problem”); 3) be calculable in principle only with paper, pen and infinite time; 4) do not require basic information to run, i.e. be autonomous.
Alan Turing was educated at Cambridge and Princeton in the 1930s. In 1936, Turing published a highly influential paper, On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem, answering an open question asked by Kurt Goedel in 1931, which showed that there is no algorithmic way to determine whether a given statement of the first order in symbolic logic is universally valid. In 1938, Alan Turing received his PhD from Princeton under Alonzo Church.
Alan Turing spent his postwar years working on some of the first reprogrammable digital computers, producing one of the first designs in 1946. He also tackled the problem of artificial intelligence, formulating the Turing Test, a test for determining whether or not a machine deserves to to be called conscious and intelligent. In the Turing test, a human types words into a keyboard to communicate with two hidden people, one a real human, the other an artificial intelligence. If the human being cannot distinguish which communicator is the human and which is the AI, the AI is said to have passed the Turing test. Some futurists, such as National Medal of Technology winner Ray Kurzweil, have suggested that we will have a computer that passes the Turing test before 2030.
Alan Turing died in 1954, from a cyanide-stained apple. His death is said to be a suicide, the result of being prosecuted for homosexuality and being forced to take hormones by the government.
Protect your devices with Threat Protection by NordVPN
