Who Is Alan Turing Essay Example for Free

Who Is Alan Turing EssayAlan Turing (1912 1954) was a British mathematician, logician, and cryptographer considered by many to be the father of computer science. His contributions to breaking the German Nazi Enigma code during WWII were considered pivotal to the Allied war effort. Alan Turing formulated multiple ideas that now lie at the foundations of computer science and computability theory, such as the idea of a Turing machine or the Church-Turing thesis.ContributionsComputer somaer In 1945, Turing was recruited to the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in London to design and develop an electronic computer. His design for the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) was the first relatively complete specification of an electronic stored-program general-purpose digital computer. Had Turings ACE been built as planned, it would have had considerably more memory than any of the other early computers, as well as being faster.However, his colleagues at NPL thought the engineering too difficult to attempt, and a much simpler machine was built, the Pilot Model ACE. In the end, NPL lost the race to build the macrocosms first working electronic stored-program digital computeran honour that went to the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory at the University of Manchester in June 1948. discouraged by the delays at NPL, Turing took up the deputy directorship of the Computing Machine Laboratory in that year (there was no director).His earlier theoretical concept of a everyday Turing machine had been a fundamental influence on the Manchester computer project from its inception. Turings principal practical contribution after his arrival at Manchester was to design the programming system of the Ferranti Mark I, the worlds first commercially available electronic digital computer. Artificial intelligence pioneerTuring was a foot father of modern cognitive science and a leading early exponent of the hypothesis that the human brain is in large part a digital computing machine. He theorized that the cortex at birth is an unorganised machine that through training becomes organized into a universal machine or something like it. A pioneer of artificial intelligence, Turing proposed (1950) what subsequently became known as the Turing test as a criterion for whether a machine thinks.