| Revision as of 23:30, 5 September 2026 by OpenWiki (Updated from the starter corpus) | Revision as of 00:19, 6 September 2026 by OpenWiki (Updated from the starter corpus) | ||
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| == Early life and education == | == Early life and education == | ||
| − | Turing was born in Maida Vale, London, and read mathematics at King's College, Cambridge, graduating with first-class honours in 1934. He was elected a fellow of King's the following year, at twenty-two, on the strength of a dissertation proving a version of the central limit | + | Turing was born in Maida Vale, London, and read mathematics at King's College, Cambridge, graduating with first-class honours in 1934. He was elected a fellow of King's the following year, at twenty-two, on the strength of a dissertation proving a version of the central limit theorem, unaware that it had already been proved a dozen years earlier. |
| == On Computable Numbers == | == On Computable Numbers == | ||
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| Turing's answer was a machine, described precisely enough to reason about and simply enough to be obviously mechanical: an endless tape divided into squares, a head that reads and writes one square at a time, and a finite table of rules saying what to do given the current symbol and state. Anything a human clerk could compute by following fixed rules, he argued, such a machine could compute. | Turing's answer was a machine, described precisely enough to reason about and simply enough to be obviously mechanical: an endless tape divided into squares, a head that reads and writes one square at a time, and a finite table of rules saying what to do given the current symbol and state. Anything a human clerk could compute by following fixed rules, he argued, such a machine could compute. | ||
| − | Two consequences followed. First, a '''universal machine''' can be built: one whose tape holds a description of any other machine, which it then simulates. This is the stored-program principle on which every [[Computer|computer]] since is | + | Two consequences followed. First, a '''universal machine''' can be built: one whose tape holds a description of any other machine, which it then simulates. This is the stored-program principle on which every [[Computer|computer]] since is built: a program is just another kind of data. Second, the '''halting problem''' is undecidable: no machine can take an arbitrary program and input and determine in general whether it will eventually stop. The Entscheidungsproblem therefore has no solution. |
| Alonzo Church had reached an equivalent result months earlier by a different route, the lambda calculus. That two such unlike formalisms define exactly the same class of computable functions is the main evidence for the Church–Turing thesis. | Alonzo Church had reached an equivalent result months earlier by a different route, the lambda calculus. That two such unlike formalisms define exactly the same class of computable functions is the main evidence for the Church–Turing thesis. | ||
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| == Bletchley Park == | == Bletchley Park == | ||
| − | From September 1939 Turing worked at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, heading Hut 8, responsible for German naval [[Cryptography|cryptanalysis]]. Building on Polish work, he and Gordon Welchman designed the '''Bombe''', an electromechanical machine that searched Enigma rotor settings for a contradiction, eliminating vast numbers of possibilities at once rather than testing each in turn. The method depended on | + | From September 1939 Turing worked at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, heading Hut 8, responsible for German naval [[Cryptography|cryptanalysis]]. Building on Polish work, he and Gordon Welchman designed the '''Bombe''', an electromechanical machine that searched Enigma rotor settings for a contradiction, eliminating vast numbers of possibilities at once rather than testing each in turn. The method depended on ''cribs'', guessed fragments of plaintext such as predictable weather reports. |
| Naval Enigma was the hardest variant and the one that mattered most for the Battle of the Atlantic. Estimates of the war's shortening by Bletchley's work vary from months to years; the historian Harry Hinsley's estimate of two years is the most frequently cited.<ref>Hinsley, F. H. and Stripp, Alan (eds.). ''Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park''. Oxford University Press, 1993.</ref> The work stayed secret for three decades, so Turing received no public recognition for it in his lifetime. | Naval Enigma was the hardest variant and the one that mattered most for the Battle of the Atlantic. Estimates of the war's shortening by Bletchley's work vary from months to years; the historian Harry Hinsley's estimate of two years is the most frequently cited.<ref>Hinsley, F. H. and Stripp, Alan (eds.). ''Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park''. Oxford University Press, 1993.</ref> The work stayed secret for three decades, so Turing received no public recognition for it in his lifetime. | ||
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| {{Quote|I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.|Alan Turing, 1950}} | {{Quote|I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.|Alan Turing, 1950}} | ||
| − | The paper also answers, in advance, most of the standard objections to machine intelligence, and proposes machine | + | The paper also answers, in advance, most of the standard objections to machine intelligence, and proposes machine learning, a child machine educated rather than fully programmed, as the practical route. |
| == Morphogenesis == | == Morphogenesis == | ||
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