Alan Turing: 3 ideas and puzzles worth knowing

3 ideas and puzzles from Alan Turing, each explained in a minute and credited to the original work. Free on Savvy.

Alan Turing sidestepped 'can machines think?' with a game about pretending to be human
In 1950, Turing proposed judging machine intelligence not by asking what a machine 'really' is, but by whether a human judge, chatting blind, can reliably tell it apart from a pers…
— Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence
Can any program tell you, in advance, if another program will ever finish running?
Imagine a checker program that takes any other program and its input, and reliably answers whether that program will eventually stop, or run forever in an infinite loop. Could such…
— Alan Turing, On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem
One 1936 paper invented the computer before anyone had built one
Alan Turing's paper 'On Computable Numbers' imagined a simple hypothetical machine — reading and writing symbols on an endless tape, one step at a time — to answer an abstract ques…
— Alan Turing, On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem

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