Alan Turing

Alan Turing was one of the greatest pioneers of our computer world. He’s the founder of what we know today as modern computer science. Turing was also a great mathematician, a code-breaker, philosopher, and certainly a risk-taker. His contributions to society not only influenced the development of today’s computers, but also impacted the outcome of the Second World War. One of Turing’s most controversial works, “On Computable Numbers” was published in 1936. In his paper, he developed an imaginary machine that looked like a typewriter and was capable of performing many different types of complex mathematical operations. Basically the machine performed on the basis of 1’s and 0’s, a number system that we are all familiar with today. The machine worked in the way that it had an endless tape attached to it. On the tape there were a series of squares where in each square there would be either placed a 1 or the square would be left blank. The tape would move back and forward one space at a time reading the instructions: If there was a “1” it would do some type of instruction, if there was a “0”, it would do another instruction. This was a revolutionary concept during that time because Turing envisioned a computer to perform any set of tasks if programmed correctly. When computers emerged around the 1950’s all they could do was perform a specific set of tasks. Turing looked further into the relationship between humans and computers, giving forth ideas that seemed unimaginable to others of his time. Some of his ideas involved the ability of these machines to perform the same functions as done by our own human brains. These computers could also learn from themselves and modify their own instructions and tasks. With Turing’s works, he took an interesting turn at