What Turing Did after He Invented the Universal Turing Machine

  • Authors:
  • B. Jack Copeland;Diane Proudfoot

  • Affiliations:
  • The Turing Project, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand. E-mail: bjcopeland@canterbury.ac.nz, http://www.AlanTuring.net;The Turing Project, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand. E-mail: d.proudfoot@phil.canterbury.ac.nz, http://www.AlanTuring.net

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Logic, Language and Information
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

Alan Turing anticipated many areas of current research incomputer and cognitive science. This article outlines his contributionsto Artificial Intelligence, connectionism, hypercomputation, andArtificial Life, and also describes Turing's pioneering role in thedevelopment of electronic stored-program digital computers. It locatesthe origins of Artificial Intelligence in postwar Britain. It examinesthe intellectual connections between the work of Turing and ofWittgenstein in respect of their views on cognition, on machineintelligence, and on the relation between provability and truth. Wecriticise widespread and influential misunderstandings of theChurch–Turing thesis and of the halting theorem. We also explore theidea of hypercomputation, outlining a number of notional machines that“compute the uncomputable.”