The Most Important Machine That Was Never Built

When he invented Turing machines in 1936, Alan Turing also invented modern computing.

Computation is a familiar concept most of us understand intuitively. Take the function f(x) = x + 3. When x is three, f(3) = 3 + 3. Six. Easy. It seems obvious that this function is computable. But some functions aren’t so simple, and it’s not so easy to determine if they can be computed, meaning they may never give us a final answer.

In 1928, the German mathematicians David Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann proposed a question called the Entscheidungsproblem (“decision problem”). In time, their question would lead to a formal definition of computability, one that allowed mathematicians to answer a host of new problems and laid the foundation for theoretical computer science.

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