TURING MACHINE

A. Name & Biography of Scientist

The name of the scientist who invented the Turing Machine is Alan Mathison Turing, an English
mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. He was
born on June 23, 1912 in Maida Vale, London, England and died on June 7, 1954 in Wilmslow,
Cheshire, England. He graduated at King's College, Cambridge with a degree in mathematics. Whilst he
was a fellow at Cambridge, he published a proof demonstrating that some purely mathematical yes–no
questions can never be answered by computation and defined the Turing machine in 1936, and went on
to prove the halting problem for Turing machines is undecidable.

During the Second World War, Turing played a crucial role in cracking intercepted coded messages that
enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis in many crucial engagements, including the Battle of the Atlantic.
He cracked the Enigma Code, the notoriously difficult to crack code used by Nazi Germany during the
Second World War. Professor Jack Copeland, an author who wrote books about Alan Turing, has
estimated that this work shortened the war in Europe by more than two years and saved over 14 million
lives.

Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts; the Labouchere Amendment of 1885 had mandated
that "gross indecency" was a criminal offence in the UK. He accepted chemical castration treatment,
with DES (Diethylstilbestrol), as an alternative to prison. Turing died in 1954, 16 days before his 42nd
birthday, from cyanide poisoning. An inquest determined his death as a suicide, but it has been noted
that the known evidence is also consistent with accidental poisoning, disputing the conclusion that his
death was a suicide but hinting at a possibility that Turing may have been murdered instead.

B. Fundamental Principles of the Idea or Theory

 You don’t always think about mathematicians building stuff like engineers do, but the truth is
mathematicians build things all the time. It’s just that the things they build exist mostly in their minds
(and published papers). They’re not concrete things you can look and feel. They do this to prove
theorems or properties. Turing did just that when he “built” the Turing machine. Turing’s machine is
not a real machine. It’s a mathematical model, a concept, just like state machines, automata or
combinational logic. It exists purely in the abstract.

In order to design his machine he needed to find an unambiguous definition of the essence of a
computer. In doing so, Turing worked out in great detail the basic concepts of a universal computing
machine—that is, a computing machine that could, at least in theory, do anything that a special-purpose
computing device could do. Turing believed that everything could be represented symbolically, even
abstract mental states, and he was one of the first advocates of the artificial-intelligence position that
computers can potentially “think”, he proposed Turing test to really determine whether a computer
could actually think.Turing sidestepped the debate about exactly how to define thinking by means of a
very practical, albeit subjective, test: if a computer acts, reacts, and interacts like a sentient being, then
call it sentient. To avoid prejudicial rejection of evidence of machine intelligence, Turing suggested the
“imitation game,” now known as the Turing test: a remote human interrogator, within a fixed time
frame, must distinguish between a computer and a human subject based on their replies to various
questions posed by the interrogator. By means of a series of such tests, a computer’s success at
“thinking” can be measured by its probability of being misidentified as the human subject.

Turing machine work up to this point was entirely abstract, entirely a theoretical demonstration.
Nevertheless, Turing made it clear from the start that his results implied the possibility of building a
machine of the sort he described.
 As envisaged by Turing, the machine performs its functions in a sequence of discrete steps and
assumes only one of a finite list of internal states at any given moment.

➔ A Turing machine consists of an infinite tape (as the memory), a tape head (a pointer to the
currently inspected cell of memory), and a state transition table (to govern the behavior of the
machine). Each cell of the tape can have one of a predetermined finite set of symbols, one of
which is the blank symbol.
➔ A Turing machine, like an algorithm, executes on an input string of bits. At the beginning, the
input string is written on the tape, the tape head points to the first cell of the string, and all other
cells are blank.
➔ During operation, the tape head is in a certain state. Every step, it consults the table (the set of
transition functions), based on only the state it's in and the symbol underneath the head, to obtain
its next choice: either halt (end the operation), or resume by writing a symbol to the current cell,
changing its state, and moving to the left or the right. This way, A Turing machine can simulate
the fact that a program is made of many lines and thus it depends on what line a program is
executing, and it can also simulate the fact that a program can react differently with different
data in memory.
➔ A Turing machine can thus either halt at some point or run forever. If it halts, the contents of the
tape are the output.
➔ By incorporating all the essential features of information processing, the Turing machine became
the basis for all subsequent digital computers, which share the machine’s basic scheme of an
input/output device (tape and reader), memory (control mechanism’s storage), and central
processing unit (control mechanism).

C. How it changed the world

Turing is acknowledged to have two formidable achievements: the theoretical construct now
known as the Turing Machine, that is today taught to all computer science undergraduates in a Theory of
Computation class, and developing a theory of artificial intelligence in his famous paper “Computing
Machinery and Intelligence. Despite its seeming simplicity, the Turing machine changed the course of
history unlike any other invention ever made. The moment Alan Turing got his theoretical model to
work inside a real-world machine is one of the greatest moments in the history of mankind.
 Recalling, Enigma, means ‘mysterious.’ It’s a coding device which was invented by a German
engineer, Arthur Scherbius, at the end of WWI. Over time, others refined and improved the machine. In
WWII, it was used to encrypt all German military communication. By that point, its code was
considered uncrackable. After almost two years of endless decoding, modeling, calculating, moving to a
restricted area even within the already super secret government facility and spending thousands of
pounds and hours on building his machine…Alan Turing got it to work. On July 9th, 1941, the Turing
machine broke the Enigma key.
From that moment on, the allied forces could decode all German intelligence, unbeknownst to
them. Until the end of the war, for another four years, the allies had an incredible advantage, which,
ultimately, won the war. Historians estimate that breaking enigma shortened the war by two years,
saving over 14 million lives.
After the war ended, the concept of the Turing machine was analyzed, improved, and built upon.
As a result of generations of research about Turing machines, we now have a different name for them.
They’re called computers, which is a very important device nowadays. Alan Turing helped end WWII
and invent the computer. The moment the gears of his machine clicked into place in the right position
for the first time is the origin of both. In one instant, he changed what history books would say looking
back and what technology would allow humanity to do going forward.
It's fascinating that one man was able to change history twice in a single moment.

a. How it changed or challenged traditional beliefs or ideas

Through the Turing Machine, its inventor, Alan Turing, laid the groundwork for modern
computing and theorized about artificial intelligence:

Computer Science
The invention of the Turing Machine paved the way for the idea of machines able
to compute and solve problems autonomously and without human intervention.
Back then, almost all computational tasks were performed manually by human
beings, and the idea of having a machine substitute for the human mind was still in its
early stages. However, Turing, through the creation of the Turing Machine as well as the
success of cracking the enigma code during WWII, envisioned a world where machines
perform various mathematical tasks for human beings, and later, perform all possible
mental tasks that a human brain could do; such has helped build the foundations of
modern computer science.

Artificial Intelligence
Turing was involved in philosophical debates over whether machines could think
like a human brain. He devised a test to answer the question. He reasoned that if a
computer acted, reacted and interacted like a sentient being, then it was sentient.

In this simple test, an interrogator in isolation asks questions of another person

and a computer. The questioner then must distinguish between the human and the
computer based on their replies to his questions. If the computer can "fool" the
interrogator, it is intelligent. Today, the Turing Test is at the heart of discussions about
artificial intelligence.
 Nowadays, we see applications of artificial intelligence everywhere in modern
society, from data analytics, to video games (bots), and even in robotics, while multiple
tech startups continue to hone and improve the capabilities of A.I.

b. Is it applied in science or practical use?

The turing machine is a combination of both science & practical use. It underwent
systematic study of its structure and mechanics through observation and experimentation. Now,
it has a variety of uses which became essential to people. A Turing machine is an abstract
computational model that performs computations by reading and writing to an infinite tape.
Turing machines provide a powerful computational model for solving problems in computer
science and testing the limits of computation. Turing machines are similar to finite
automata/finite state machines but have the advantage of unlimited memory. They are capable of
simulating common computers; a problem that a common computer can solve (given enough
memory) will also be solvable using a Turing machine, and vice versa.
Turing machines found applications in algorithmic information theory and complexity
studies, software testing, high performance computing, machine learning, software engineering,
computer networks and evolutionary computations.