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 ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

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 ...