Life, Achievement, and Legacy to Computer Systems of Alan Turing Essay

Alan Turing the computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, and English mathematician was born on June 23, 1912. Turing was quite influential in computer science development, in addition to setting the framework for the formalization of the algorithm concept, in addition to the use of the Turing machine that he developed, for computation. Between 1945 and 1947, Turing was involved in an Automatic Computing Engine project. In February 1946, Turing presented a paper that has been considered the “first detailed design of a stored-program computer” (Copeland & Proudfoot 2004 par. 3-5). The University of Manchester appointed Turing to head its computing laboratory in 1949, as the deputy director. It was also during this time that Turing progressed with on another project that involved the development of software dubbed, the Manchester Mark I, regarded as amongst the earliest known stored-program computers (Agar 2002 p. 36).

Turing endeavored to attend to the artificial intelligence challenge, and this is what prompted him to propose the Turing test, which is more of an attempt to come up with a standard that would allow for “intelligent” machines. The idea behind the Turing test holds that it is possible to assume that a computer is “thinking” if and when it is capable of hoodwinking an interrogator to harbor the assumption that the conversation that occurred was not with a computer, but with a fellow human being. In his proposal, Turing opined that as opposed to the development of a program that would simulate the mind of a human being, it would be far much easier to design a modest one that would instead simulate the mind of a child, followed by exposure of the same to an education program. Turing was also instrumental in the development of a chess program (Levin 2006 p. 43).

Turing published a significant paper titled, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” (Turing 1936 p. 241), whereby he reformulated the results that had been realized by Kurt Godel before him, regarding computation and proof limits. Accordingly, Turing was able to replace the formal language that Godel had realized, and which relied on arithmetic. That is how the simple and formal Turing machines came along. Turing was able to prove that these kinds of machines had the capability to execute imaginable computation in mathematics, as long as an algorithm was used to represent it. The theory of computation heavily relies on Turing machines. The work by Turing is significantly more intuitive and accessible. T

The Association for Computing Machinery has been giving away the Turing Award on an annual basis since 1966 to individuals that exhibit profound technical contributions towards the world of computers. This is an honor in computing that is regarded in the same rank as the Nobel Prize (Geringer 2007 par. 5). Turing was named by Time Magazine as “one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century” (The Time 100 1999 p.1) due to the role that he played in the development of the modern computer. As Time Magazine has noted “The fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine.” (The Time 100 1999 p.1).

Reference List

Agar, J., 2002, The Government Machine. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Copeland, J, and Proudfoot, D 2004, “Alan Turing, codebreaker and computer pioneer”. Web.

Copeland, B., 2004, The Essential Turing, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Geringer, S 2007, “ACMS Turing Award Prize raised to $ 250,000”. ACM press release. Web.

Levin, J., 2006, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines. New York: Knopf (34)

The Time 100 1999, Allan Turing. The Time 100. Web.

Turing, A.M. (1936), “On Computable numbers with an application to Entscheidungsproblem”, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Vol. 2, No. 42, pp. 230-65.