The importance of Alan Turing’s work
In: Mathematics
Alan Turing did three enormous things on the theory side of computers
* All machines are equally “capable” (so long as they are “Turing Complete” and of course have enough memory). Before this, when computing equipment was designed, people didn’t know if adding a new instruction would make the machine *able* to compute things that other computers can’t.
* Some problems can’t be solved (the “halting” problem). Before this, we didn’t know if a computer can solve *any* problem; now we know they can’t
* Thanks to the Bombe and other devices and a couple of thousand of other very talented people, we know that it’s possible to make a computer from an engineering point of view. Before Turing (and arguably the American ENIAC), people thought putting a dozen tubes in one machine was hard; now we know you can build a machine with thousands of tubes
He’s also famous for the Turing test, which is one way to tell if a machine is “intelligent” or not.
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