What Turing did after he invented the universal Turing machine (Q1592265): Difference between revisions

The secrecy (originally, at least, due to the needs of World War II) that surrounded the development of computers in Great Britain has meant a lack of basic facts in the historical literature concerning the many original developments that took place there. It appears to have also meant a certain discounting of those developments, even when known, because of the resulting isolation and lack of influence on the Atanasoff-ENIAC line which is usually regarded as the principal lineage of the modern computer. This article, like others by the authors, effectively attempts to redress this historical imbalance, especially by detailing Alan Turing's contributions. An argument is sketched, for example, that Turing's 1936 abstract notion of the universal Turing machine (suggested by a lecture of M.H.A. Newman in 1935) saw explicit practical application in the design of ``the world's first electronic stored-program digital computer'' at the University of Manchester (first run in 1948) and of the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) at the National Physical Laboratory (1950) where Turing worked. It is a measure of the authors' care with accuracy and objectivity that they try to balance Turing's credit with that due to engineers (T. H. Flowers, F. C. Williams, and T. Kilburn): a difficult allocation judgement to make, it seems, on the basis of the known evidence. In addition to the ``first computer'', Turing's anticipation, if not influence, is documented in the areas of artificial intelligence, connectionism, hypercomputation, neural computation and morphogenesis. Argument is made against a common misunderstanding of the Church-Turing thesis. The authors also present Ludwig Wittgenstein's reactions to Turing's ideas. The references include other papers by the authors on a number of these same topics.