[BITList] Happy Birthday, Turing's universal machine

[John Feltham]

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Happy Birthday, Turing's universal machine

Solving the unsolvable
By Phil Manchester • Get more from this author

Posted in Science, 18th November 2008 00:21 GMT

It's just 71 years ago this month that a seminal paper from Alan  
Turing was published, which helped pave the way to today's multi- 
billion dollar IT industry and confer on Turing the title of father of  
modern computer science.

As is often the case in scientific endeavour, Turing was actually  
working on an entirely different task when he stumbled on a way to  
create a general-purpose computer.

The paper that encapsulated this machine? On Computable Numbers with  
an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.

The Entscheidungsproblem - which translated from German literally  
means "decision problem" - referred to a mathematical challenge laid  
down by German mathematician David Hilbert.

The Entscheidungsproblem goes to the very heart of Hilbert's thoughts  
on the nature of mathematics. At the start of the twentieth century  
deep questions were being asked about science and the tools used to  
think about scientific problems. In the same way that Einstein's work  
had challenged orthodox views of physics, so Hilbert and others  
questioned mathematics.

Hilbert posed three fundamental questions: is mathematics "complete",  
is it "consistent," and - the Entscheidungsproblem - is it  
"decidable". The first two were answered - negatively - in 1931 by the  
Austrian mathematician Kurt Godel.

Turing scuppered Hilbert's final question with his 1937 paper although  
the American mathematician Alonzo Church - later Turing's professor at  
Princeton - came up with a similar negative analysis a year earlier.  
The two approaches are generally combined as the Church-Turing Theorem.

Turing's real insight was, of course, the concept of a "Universal (or  
Turing) machine." He conceived the Universal Machine as a way to  
demonstrate that it was impossible to solve the Entscheidungsproblem.

But he had also stumbled on what was effectively the blue print for a  
general-purpose computer and this almost certainly justifies his  
status as the founder of modern computing.

Copies of Turing's original paper are available online both in  
facsimile and in text form. ®






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