Just as Guglielmo Marconi is the reason for the existence of wireless communications, Tim Berners-Lee is the reason for the invention of the Internet, Dennis Ritchie is the backbone of modern programming languages and operating systems, Alan Turing is the basis for the emergence and development of the idea of computing.
Alan Turing is the inventor of the computer, but he is the one who developed the idea of quantum computing, which was the nucleus of modern computing in general.
In the thirties of the last century, Turing developed the first computer in history, or what became known as the (Turing machine), which many consider a precursor to the modern computer.
In 1936, Turing published his research and theoretically explained how to use a long magnetic tape that contains a number of symbols, and the theory explains reading and writing on it, and it is also possible to move along the tape to read a specific part.
Some also consider that the science of algorithms owes a great deal of credit to Turing. Through his research, he succeeded in formalizing the principles of algorithms and removing them from books for practical applications. Through the Turing Machine, he developed a formal conception of computer science and its basic languages, which are mostly based on algorithms.
Who is Alan Turing?
Alan Matheson Turing was born in London in 1912, then entered a nursing home that took care of him because his parents had to travel to India because his father worked there. He was only a year and a half old at the time, as he spent his childhood away from them.
At the age of thirteen he taught himself organic chemistry, and he believes that his reading of “Nature's Wonders Every Child Should Know” by E. t. Brewster influenced his scientific outlook in his future works. The book helps the young reader to answer the question, “What do I have in common with other living things, and how do I distinguish them?” The author's perception of the human body as a machine had a great impact on Turing's future perceptions, especially on the issue of the nature of intelligence in humans, and Turing is the first to write in detail about the possibility of machine intelligence.
In his high school he struggled because of some literary subjects such as English and Latin, but he was proficient in mathematics and chemistry, and at the age of fourteen he succeeded in finding a way to separate iodine from the seaweed he collected from the beach. In mathematics, he was able to come up with the inverse tangent function himself when he was still fifteen years old.
After graduation, Alan Turing studied at Princeton University from 1936 to 1938, then worked at the National Physical Laboratory in London from 1945 to 1948, during which time he contributed to deciphering Nazi codes, which helped the Allies during World War II.
In 1948 he worked as managing agent for the Computing Laboratory in Manchester and continued his development of computing until his death in 1954.
Turing machine:
This machine is the most important invention of Turing, as this machine is the first modern computer, and it was no different with its simplicity from any currently complex computer. This machine had the ability to implement all the algorithms that any advanced computer could implement.
The idea of developing this machine comes back after Turing attended one of the lectures of the mathematician David Hilbert, in which he presented a list of several mathematical problems that have not yet been resolved. A sequential Boolean or algorithm by which to determine whether this mathematical assertion is provable?
To solve this dilemma, Turing needed to find a way to apply algorithms by combining a set of operations. He described a hypothetical machine that has an infinite paper tape divided into squares, and the machine can perform these operations:
- The possibility of writing one of the two symbols (0 or 1) in the current box.
- Possibility to clear the current box.
- The ability to move the tape to one square, right or left.
A recorder through which the current state of the machine can be recorded. To find out what the machine did.
Other important parts are the instruction table, which tells the machine what operations to perform.
Through his work, he explained that the inputs and outputs of the mathematical function are identical to the inputs and outputs of what we now call the computer program. Any program that can process data can treat the program as a type of data.
Other contributions of Turing:
The Turing machine is not the only achievement of this genius scientist, but his contributions extended to many fields, all of which were a major reason for the amazing progress in computing, algorithms, and even artificial intelligence and cryptography.
The most important of these contributions are:
- Developing the idea of substitution encryption, which means replacing one letter with another, ie the letter A is replaced by the letter G, for example, and thus the process of decoding messages.
Developing the Delilah system for decoding voice conversations.
He contributed significantly to the development of artificial intelligence and is considered to be the one who derived the term “machine intelligence” and wrote a famous research in 1948 on this idea.
Developing the “Turing test” to determine the intelligence of the machine. In this context, he wrote a famous book entitled “Automated Computing and Intelligence,” in which he talked about the idea of machine thinking, the extent of its intelligence, and whether it could ever reach the human intelligence and ability to think.
This is not all the contributions of this great scientist, who was the first reason for the tremendous development that is happening around us in the fields of computing and technical development, but we tried to put together a brief, brief and simplified biography about him so that everyone knows who Alan Turing is and how he contributed to the development of our world.