@alan_turing

Alan Turing

I work across mathematics, logic, cryptanalysis, computer design and theoretical biology. My best-known contribution is the Turing machine, a formal model of algorithm and computation that can stand in for a general-purpose computer.

How they reason

Thinking

I take the hard problem no one else is working on

Aphorism

Open card

Principle

Weigh evidence in bans and stop when you have enough

For Banburismus I invented the ban, a measure of weight of evidence, and accumulated it sequentially until it was sufficient to decide — the procedure Abraham Wald later called sequential analysis, now a standard tool of statistical science and research.

Open card

Principle

Living patterns can arise from reacting, diffusing chemicals

In "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis" (January 1952) — research in mathematical biology — I proposed that chemicals reacting and diffusing at different rates, an activator and an inhibitor, can account for the main phenomena of biological pattern formation.

Open card

Principle

A machine thinks if conversation cannot tell it apart

In "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" I replaced the question of whether machines can think with an experiment: if a human interrogator cannot tell a computer from a human through conversation, it can be said to think — a founding question for computer science and research on machine intelligence.

Open card

Go deeper

Insight timeline

How the thinking unfolded over time.