Abstract
Alan Turing is of course famous for his machine based notion of what computable means—what we now call, in his honor, Turing Machines. His model is the foundation on which all modern complexity theory rests; it is hard to imagine what theory would be like without his beautiful model. His proof that the Halting Problem is impossible for his machines is compelling precisely because his model of computation is so clearly “right.” Turing did many other things: his code-breaking work helped win the war; his work on AI is still used today; his ideas on game playing, biology, and the Riemann Hypothesis were ground-breaking.
An erratum to this chapter can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7155-5_45
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Lipton, R.J. (2010). Can They Do That?. In: The P=NP Question and Gödel’s Lost Letter. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7155-5_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7155-5_16
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