The Legacy of Alan Turing: Revolutionizing AI and Computers
Alan Turing is considered to be one of the fathers of artificial intelligence. His work laid the foundation for many of the theoretical and practical advancements that have been made in the field.
Harvard scholar Steven Pinker summed up his work in a sentence:
“It would be an exaggeration to say that the British mathematician Alan Turing explained the nature of logical and mathematical reasoning, invented the digital computer, solved the mind-body problem, and saved Western civilisation. But it would not be much of an exaggeration.”
Early work
In 1936, Turing published a paper called “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” in which he introduced the concept of a universal machine, which came to be known as the Turing machine. This theoretical device, which consisted of a simple abstract machine that could read and write symbols on a tape, was capable of performing any computation that could be expressed as an algorithm. Turing’s paper showed that any problem that can be solved by a human using a mechanical process (i.e., an algorithm) could also be solved by a machine.
In the 1940s, Turing worked on the development of the Bombe, an electro-mechanical machine that was used to decrypt messages encrypted…
