When he invented Turing machines in 1936, Alan Turing also invented modern computing. In 1928, the German mathematicians David Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann proposed a question called the ...

For something that has been around since the 1930s and is so foundational to computer science, you’d think that the Turing machine, an abstraction for mechanical computation, would be easily ...

Once upon a time, over 40 years ago, a horde of computer scientists descended on the West German city of Dortmund. They were competing to catch an elusive quarry — only four of its kind had ever been ...

In the early 1950s, most people had never seen a computer. Those who had were unlikely to describe it as anything more than a complicated calculating machine. Computers were expensive, slow by modern ...

In 1950, British computer scientist Alan Turing proposed an experimental method for answering the question: can machines think? He suggested if a human couldn’t tell whether they were speaking to an ...