Alan Turing
(1912-1954)
Alan Turing worked with
Claude Shannon and
John von Neumann to physically realize his 1937 idea of a universal computer, the "Turing Machine."
Starting from Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems, he reformulated Gödel's results on the limits of proof and computation, replacing Gödel's universal arithmetic-based formal language with the formal and simple hypothetical devices that became known a Turing machine.
Turing did not solve David Hilbert's decision problem (
Entscheidungsproblem), but he reformulated it in terms of his computing machine as the problem of whether a computer would ever stop (with a result), known as the halting problem. Von Neumann said that the central concept of the modern computer was due to Turing's paper.
Turing received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton in 1938, studying under Alonzo Church, who also published on the halting problem. Von Neumann wanted to hire Turing as his postdoctoral assistant, but he went back to the United Kingdom, where he did his famous work at Bletchley Park building machines that could break the codes of Nazi Enigma machines.
Herbert Simon suggests that Turing's 1950 essay
Computing Machinery and Intelligence be considered the beginnings of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
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