Alan Turing

INDUCTED IN THE CLASS OF 2000

Notable accomplishments:

• Published “Turing’s Proof” arguing some problems are undecidable by a computer (1936)
• Developed the Turing Machine, an early computer (1936)
• Developed the “Turing Reduction” theory of computation (1939)
• Played significant role in cracking Nazi’s Enigma code during World War II (1939-1945)
• Helped develop the Colossus computer (1943-1945)
• Designed the Automatic Computing Engine, one of the first designs of a stored-program computer (1945)
• Developed the “Turing test” to determine if a computer had achieved actual thought (1949)

Quotes:
“It is not altogether unreasonable to describe digital computers as brains.” (BBC, May 15, 1951)

“A digital computer is a universal machine in the sense that it can be made to replace any machine of a certain very wide class. It will not replace a bulldozer or a steam-engine or a telescope, but it will replace any rival design of calculating machine, that is to say any machine into which one can feed data and which will later print out results. In order to arrange for our computer to imitate a given machine it is only necessary to programme the computer to calculate what the machine in question would do under given circumstances, and in particular what answers it would print out. The computer can then be made to print out the same answers.” (BBC, May 15, 1951)

“I certainly hope and believe that no great efforts will be put into making machines with the most distinctively human, but non-intellectual characteristics such as the shape of the human body. It appears to me to be quite futile to make such attempts and their results would have something like the unpleasant quality of artificial flowers.” (BBC, May 15, 1951)

Suggested reading:
“The Essential Turing: Seminal Writings in Computing, Logic, Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence, and Artificial Life plus The Secrets of Enigma” by Alan Turing, edited by B. Jack Copeland (2004)

“The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer” by David Leavitt (2006)

“Turing’s Vision: The Birth of Computer Science” by Chris Bernhardt (2016)

Learn more:
Alan Turing Papers at the University of Manchester

The Turing Archive at the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine