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INTRODUCTION

Science Museum SW7 2DD

Alan Turing, (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954), was a British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist.

He was highly influential in the development of computer science, giving a formalisation of the concepts of “algorithm” and “computation” with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer.

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1912-1954

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ALAN TURING

Turing is widely considered to be the father of computer science and artificial intelligence.

4 ENTRANCE

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ENTRANCE

ENTRANCE

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Computing before computers

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Alan Turing’s war

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ACE – the Automatic Computing Engine

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Can machines think?

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A matter of life and death

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Programming computers today Celebrate the centenary of the birth of this pioneering British figure Alan Turing.

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TURINGS WORLD WAR EFFORTS During World War II, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Britain’s codebreaking centre. For a time he was head of Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis.

He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the method of the bombe, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine.

ACE Automatic Computing Engine 1946

AFTER THE WAR After the war, he worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he designed the ACE, one of the first designs for a stored-program computer. In 1948 Turing joined Max Newman’s Computing Laboratory at Manchester University, where he assisted in the development of the Manchester computers and became interested in mathematical biology. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis, and predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov– Zhabotinsky reaction, which were first observed in the 1960s

TURING MACHINE Automatic Computing Engine 1946

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LIFE AND LEGACY

BOMBE Decipher German Encryptions 1939

A Turing machine is a hypothetical device that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules. Despite its simplicity, a Turing machine can be adapted to simulate the logic of any computer algorithm, and is particularly useful in explaining the functions of a CPU inside a computer.

The “Turing” machine was invented in 1936 by Alan Turing who called it an “a-machine” (automatic machine). The Turing machine is not intended as practical computing technology, but rather as a hypothetical device representing a computing machine. Turing machines help computer scientists understand the limits of mechanical computation

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