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A Famous Computer Scientist

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Biography of Alan Turing

Alan Turing was born in 1912, his social origins lay just on the borderline between landed gentry and the commercial classes. From 1931 until 1934, Turing studied at King's College, Cambridge. During these years, he showed his extraordinary level of mathematical and scientific understanding. He has three brilliant achievements during his life, first, during World War II, he created an electromechanical machine called the bombe which helped the Allies break German military codes to bring the war to an early end. Second, he introduced the famous "Turing test" states that if a human brain cannot tell the difference between the responses of a human being and that of an ai machine, the machine is considered to have artificial intelligence. And the most important, he introduced a concept named “Turing-machine”, A Turing machine is an abstract machine with an infinite strip of paper divided into small squares, each with a different color. There was a machine head moving on the tape. The machine head has an internal set of states and some fixed programs. At each moment, the machine head will read a grid information from the current paper tape, and then search the program table in combination with its own internal state, output information to the paper tape grid according to the program, and transform its own internal state, and then move. It proved the general computing theory and confirmed the possibility of computer realization. At the same time, it gave the main structure of the computer. The Turing machine model introduced the concepts of reading and writing, algorithm and program language, which greatly broke through the design concept of the past computing machine.

Alan Turing (1912-1954)