In the early 1950s, most people had never seen a computer. Those who had were unlikely to describe it as anything more than a ...

Alan Turing was one of the most influential British figures of the 20th century. In 1936, Turing invented the computer as part of his attempt to solve a fiendish puzzle known as the ...

A few years ago, composer Matthew Suttor was exploring Alan Turing’s archives at King’s College, Cambridge, when he happened upon a typed draft of a lecture the pioneering computer scientist and World ...

Newly revealed documents show that, while breaking Nazi codes, Turing was also building a device that almost changed military ...

One of the problems with a classic Turing machine is the tape must be infinitely long. [Mark’s] Turing Ring still doesn’t have an infinite tape, but it does make it circular to save space. That along ...

Author's rendition of a basic Turing test set-up. Sitting in between two agents (one human and one machine), a person needs to interact with both agents and determine (correctly) which is a machine.

Do computers think? Some experts say yes, some say no. —Time magazine, Jan. 23, 1950 How do we tell whether a machine thinks? Much of today’s discussion of the matter starts with British computer ...

On the left, Turing’s original test involves a human interrogator (C) trying to identify a machine (A) that imitates a human assistant (B). On the right, the modern Turing-like test replaces the human ...