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History of Mathematics · Alan Turing: the machine that thinks on tape

Image credits

Historical images and photographs All of them come from Wikimedia Commons. We use the thumbnails provided by Commons, with no editing beyond …

History of Mathematics · Alan Turing: the machine that thinks on tape

The legacy of Alan Turing

Turing believes machines think. Turing lies with men. Therefore machines do not think. — Alan Turing, letter to Norman Routledge (1952) The …

History of Mathematics · Alan Turing: the machine that thinks on tape

Morphogenesis: the leopard's spots in equations

An embryo starts as a ball of almost identical cells. Even so, it ends up with five fingers on each hand, stripes on a zebra and spots on a …

History of Mathematics · Alan Turing: the machine that thinks on tape

The imitation game: can a machine think?

I propose to consider the question, “Can machines think?” — Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (1950) So begins the paper …

History of Mathematics · Alan Turing: the machine that thinks on tape

Banburismus: weighing evidence in decibans

The bombe was fast, but not fast enough to test every rotor order of the naval Enigma. In 1940 Turing invented a pencil-and-paper method to …

History of Mathematics · Alan Turing: the machine that thinks on tape

The Enigma: 159 quintillion keys and one flaw

A three-rotor Enigma machine on display at the National Cryptologic Museum of the American security agency. At the top, the rotors; in the …