The importance of Alan Turing’s work
In: Mathematics
Well, it depends on what you mean by his “work”, he did a great deal of things.
“enigma” was his code decryption machine, that broke the German encryption to be able to intercept their radio transmission. Some people argue that is the single greatest achievement during world War 2. Imagine playing Warship but knowing exactly how the enemy has placed his warships.
He also made a few very important mathematical works. One of the most important is the “Turing machine”. Essentially, it mathematically shows how any imaginable calculation can be done by Turing machine by having the right input. This was important for the development of the computer, even a modern one. It is essentially a simplified model of a computer, developed decades before the modern compute.
1. He created the Turing Machine, which later became the computer.
2. He was a codebreaker that helped Britain intercept Nazi communications, which helped them win WWII.
3. He started the field of artificial intelligence.
What I’ll tell you is limited to what we were taught in our course. So it might be incomplete. Turing actually defined what a “computation problem” is. He essentially made a theoretical machine that completely represents a human’s intuitive idea of a computation. So any problem which a human can solve, can be solved using a Turing Machine.
It essentially related a intuitive concept (like, what can we compute, or what can we not compute) to a well defined mathematical concept (a Turing Machine) and this is called the Church-Turing Thesis. (from what I know, Church had something to do with lambda calculus, which was proven to be what Turing said, but that was not taught to us)
Watch the phenomenal documentary published by the BBC, *Bletchley Park, Code Breaking’s Forgotten Genius*. 😊👍🏽
Alan Turing did three enormous things on the theory side of computers
* All machines are equally “capable” (so long as they are “Turing Complete” and of course have enough memory). Before this, when computing equipment was designed, people didn’t know if adding a new instruction would make the machine *able* to compute things that other computers can’t.
* Some problems can’t be solved (the “halting” problem). Before this, we didn’t know if a computer can solve *any* problem; now we know they can’t
* Thanks to the Bombe and other devices and a couple of thousand of other very talented people, we know that it’s possible to make a computer from an engineering point of view. Before Turing (and arguably the American ENIAC), people thought putting a dozen tubes in one machine was hard; now we know you can build a machine with thousands of tubes
He’s also famous for the Turing test, which is one way to tell if a machine is “intelligent” or not.
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