The history of digital computing can be divided into an old testament and a new testament. The prophets of the old testament, led by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the 1670s, supplied the logic; those ...

Alan Turing theorized a machine that could do infinite calculations from an infinite amount of data that computes based on a set of rules. It starts with an input, transforms the data and outputs an ...

It is the height of the Second World War. A group of codebreakers stands in a dimly lit warehouse 50 miles northwest of London, a giant machine composed of spinning drums and wires looms in front of ...

In 1939, after the outbreak of World War II, the Allied forces facing Germany had a problem. While it was easy to intercept German wireless communications, their content was difficult to decipher as ...

Such is Turing's legacy: that of a nested chain of pretenses, each pointing not to reality, but to the caricature of another idea, device, individual, or concept. It's hard to overestimate Alan Turing ...

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 ...