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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Alan Turing theorized a machine that could do infinite calculations from an infinite amount of data that computes based on a set of rules. It starts with an input, transforms the data and outputs an ...

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 ...

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 ...

As a practising computer scientist, I thought I had a fairly good grasp of Alan Turing’s many contributions to the field. But The Turing Guide, by Jack Copeland, Jonathan Bowen, Mark Sprevak and Robin ...

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 ...

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 ...