The British mathematician and pioneer of computing Alan Turing published a paper in 1936 which described a Universal Machine, a theoretical model of a computer processor that would later become known ...

IN 1935, Alan Turing set out to build a reputation by outflanking the world’s leading mathematician. Turing was 22 years old, and a new fellow at Cambridge. His target, David Hilbert, was the ...

It is the height of the Second World War. A group of codebreakers stands in a dimly lit warehouse 50 miles northwest of London, a giant machine composed of spinning drums and wires looms in front of ...

When he invented Turing machines in 1936, Alan Turing also invented modern computing. In 1928, the German mathematicians David Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann proposed a question called the ...

Such is Turing's legacy: that of a nested chain of pretenses, each pointing not to reality, but to the caricature of another idea, device, individual, or concept. It's hard to overestimate Alan Turing ...

Turing machines are widely believed to be universal, in the sense that any computation done by any system can also be done by a Turing machine. In a new article, researchers present their work ...

Mathematicians. If you let them use the concept of infinity, there’s almost nothing they won’t be able to prove. Case in point: the Turing machine. The idea is that with an infinite length of tape, ...

Alan Turing, the intellectual father of the modern computer, had a theory. He believed that one day machines would become so powerful that they would think just like humans. He even devised a test, ...

Once upon a time, over 40 years ago, a horde of computer scientists descended on the West German city of Dortmund. They were competing to catch an elusive quarry — only four of its kind had ever been ...

One hundred and fifty years of mathematics will be proved wrong if a new computer program stops running. Thankfully, it’s unlikely to happen, but the code behind it is testing the limits of the ...