WASHINGTON POST: …In reality, Turing’s greatest breakthrough wasn’t mechanical, but theoretical — that 1936 paper that Dyson was talking about. “On Computable Numbers,” written in England, was published in the proceedings of the London Mathematical Society after Turing arrived at Princeton, where he would spend two academic years earning a Ph.D.
Amid the paper’s thicket of equations and mathematical theories lay a powerful idea: that it would be possible to build a machine that could compute anything that a human could compute.
Turing was addressing a question of logic, but in the process he clearly described a real machine that someone could build, one that would use 0s and 1s for computation.
And here we are… (more)
