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Turing Machine

The concept of the Turing Machine made its debut in 1956 and was the brainchild of the renowned mathematician Alan Turing. It was an abstract or theoretical computer that had as its purpose the provision of a mathematically exact definition of an algorithm and succeeded in providing it by means of certain set of finite components such as a set of instructions, a set of internal states and an alphabet that contained a blank symbol. The Turing Machine is still relevant today and is one of the primary abstractions that are used by the modern theories of computability (ie. the theories of what computers are capable and not capable of doing) and theories regarding complexity and computation. The modern computer comes very close to instantiating Turing’s vision, by implementing a simple set of instructions to achieve an extraordinary set of computing power.

A Turing Machine is not a complex kind of computer, but is in fact quite simple and restricted in its operational capacities to the reading and writing of symbols on a tape of infinite length (one that is split up into cells), or to traveling along the tape, one cell at a time, either to the left or to the right according to a simple set of rules. The state of a Turing Machine at any point in time can be interpreted semantically so as to indicate meaningful results of an algorithm.

The advent of artificial intelligence (especially the so-called Strong AI) was heavily influenced by the view that human beings may be something like a Universal Turing Machine. If this view is correct, then it should be possible to actually recreate salient human qualities, such as rationality and intelligence. The prospect that human beings were nothing but UTMs led to what has been called Computationalism in the Cognitive Sciences: the view that the human mind is like a computer program running on computational hardware (the brain).

Web Resources On Turing Machine

What is a Turing Machine?
Wikipedia: Turing Machine

Book Resources On Turing Machine

Turing and the Universal Machine: The Making of the Modern Computer by Jon Agar
The Universal Turing Machine : A Half-Century Survey by Rolf Herken (Editor)

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