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Alan Turing

Born in 1912 in London, England, Alan Turing was a mathematician and a logician and is widely considered to be the father of modern computer science. His name is immortalized in such concepts as the Turing machine, a theoretical machine that evolved into one of the bedrocks of modern computing, as well as the Church-Turing thesis, which attests to the capacity of a Turing machine to perform any algorithm or calculation given time and storage space. He also proposed the Turing test as the best means that we have for determining whether a thing, such as a computer or a piece of software, is intelligent. The Turing test was proposed in the midst of heavy debate about the possibilities of artificial intelligence.

Turing was also a cryptographer who performed duties of deciphering German top-secret codes during the Second World War through the use of the pioneering programmed computer called Colossus. And although he never defined himself as a philosopher, his work entitled Computing Machinery and Intelligence impacted the philosophical community to the point where it has become a mainstay in its modern literature due to its novel views on the mind-body question. His dynamic professional life was abruptly curtailed when he was arrested and convicted for homosexual acts. He died in 1954 of cyanide poisoning and it is believed to have been suicide.

Web Resources On Alan Turing

SEP: Alan Turing
Wikipedia: Alan Turing

Book Resources On Alan Turing

Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker by Christof Teuscher
The Essential Turing: Seminal Writings in Computing, Logic, Philosophy, Artificial Intellegence, and Artificial Life by B. Jack Copeland, Alan Mathison Turing

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