Alan Turing was a British mathematician and logician whose 1936 paper formalized the modern concept of computation through what is now called the Turing machine, and who led the team at Bletchley Park that broke the German Enigma cipher during the Second World War, work credited with shortening the war significantly. In 1952 he was prosecuted under British law for homosexual acts, then a criminal offense, and accepted chemical castration as an alternative to prison; he died in 1954 of cyanide poisoning, ruled a suicide by the inquest at the time, a ruling some later biographers have questioned as inconclusive. He received a posthumous royal pardon in 2013.
Facts
Connections
Associated With
Source Wikipedia: Natural Language Processing
Pilot ACE, Systems Pilot ACE was a cut-down build of the full Automatic Computing Engine Turing designed at NPL; he left the laboratory, disillusioned by the pace of the project, before Pilot ACE itself was completed, and James Wilkinson's team carried the build forward.
Source Wikipedia: Pilot ACE
Source Wikipedia: Theory of Computation
In Field
Source Alan Turing: The EnigmaAndrew Hodges
Source Wikipedia: Alan Turing
Invented
Source Wikipedia: Bombe
Source Alan Turing: The EnigmaAndrew Hodges
Invented By
Alan Turing independently formulated the equivalent claim in 1936 using Turing machines, giving the thesis its joint name.
Alan Turing proved the undecidability of the halting problem in his foundational 1936 paper on computable numbers.
In the Other Atlases
Sources
1. Alan Turing: The Enigma
Andrew Hodges, Burnett Books, 1983
2. Wikipedia: Alan Turing
Wikimedia FoundationLead section
He was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine.
Lead section, opening sentence
Alan Mathison Turing (23 June 1912-7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist.
In Field: Machine Learning, Early computers and the Turing test section
It would be better to produce a simpler one to simulate a child's mind and then to subject it to a course of education.
View the Source Wikipedia: Natural Language Processing
Wikimedia FoundationAssociated With: Natural Language Processing, History section, Turing's 1950 paperView the Source Wikipedia: Theory of Computation
Wikimedia FoundationAssociated With: Theory of Computation, History section, founding figuresView the Source Wikipedia: Bombe
Wikimedia FoundationInvented: The Bombe, Design and manufacture sectionQuote, Invented: The Bombe, Design and manufacture section
The initial design of the British bombe was produced in 1939...by Alan Turing
Wikipedia: Pilot ACE
Wikimedia FoundationAssociated With: Pilot ACE, Lead sectionQuote, Associated With: Pilot ACE, Lead section
It was a preliminary version of the full ACE, which was designed by Alan Turing, who left NPL before construction of the Pilot ACE was completed.
Reader Challenges (0)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.