The major contribution of Alan Turing to the computer science includes the following.
"Turing test" refers to the testing procedure in which the tester and the software being tested are separated, therefore, the tester could propose any questions for the software to answer, mainly through peripherals such as keyboard.
If on average, more than 30 percent of all the participant tester cannot tell whether the tested software is a human or not, then the machine has cleared the test and is said to have machine intelligence (Von Ruden, Galilea Bascara(2018)).
The idea of Turing Test is originated from Alan Turing' Paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", which discussed how to assesses whether machines can really think or not( Turing, 1950), and is regarded as one of the pioneers in computer science and cryptography during the fifties. Among them, 30% is a prediction of Turing's machine thinking ability in 2000. At present, we are still far below this percentage.
Turing also gives prediction that there might be some computers would pass the Turing Test by the end of the 20th Century. On June 7, 2014, British Royal Society held"2014 Turing Test" conference, and the sponsor is the University of Reading. The sponsor issued a press release which claims that the artificial intelligence software “Eugene Goostman” (Barnard,2016), developed by the Russian engineer, Vladimir Veselov, had passed the Turing test. Although "Eugene" is no way near a human thinking level, it is regarded as a markable milestone in the history of AI.
Turing proposed the idea of Turing Machine in 1936. It is considered to be an adequate computational model which can mimic all the computing logic and tasks of real-world computers. The so-called Turing machine is actually an abstract concept which contains a infinitely long tape, and it is made up of even smaller cells, each with a different color. A machine reader head is rotating against the tape.
This head is built-in with some internal states and some fixed applications. At every moment, the machine head will pick and read some data of the cell from the tape, then conduct a search on its own internal state look-up table.
In 1949, Turing became the vice president of the University of Manchester Computing Laboratory, and devoted himself to developing the software necessary to run the world first-ever stored -program computer, “Manchester Baby”.
With the paper entitled "Can machines think?" being published by Turing in 1956, the emergence and research of Artificial Intelligence had entered a more practical-oriented phase. Turing's idea of machine intelligence should be considered as the direct origins of artificial intelligence.
Turing has been doing research in mathematical biology since 1952 until his death. In 1952, published the paper to discuss the reaction-diffusion system in biology, from a pattern structure point of view (Turing, 1952).
His main interest is to correlate the Fibonacci sequence with a possible Fibonacci number structure which exists in plants structure. The reaction diffusion formula which Turing had applied, has now turned into the essence of the pattern formation category. It was until the publication of “Selected Works of Alan Turing” in 1992, that this series of biology related work of his had get published and known by the public.
In his own way, Turing was able to solve the Hilbert decision problem: the determination of the satisfiability of the formula of narrow predicate calculus (also known as first-order logic). It is because the emergence of the concepts such as reduction and relative recursion, that made comparison on the degree of non-determinability and non-recursion possible. On this basis, Turing forward the important concept of incomprehensibility, and later made significant progress in this area.
Turing, A.M. (1950). Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind, LIX, 433-460.
Barnard, K. (2016). Who is Eugene Goostman anyway? : tech feature.
Von Ruden, Galilea Bascara(2018)Why the Turing Test Revised is Still the Turing Test.Other, California Institute of Technology. doi:10.7907/9KP0-TQ82.
Turing, A. (1952). The chemical basis of morphogenesis. Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, 52, 153-197.