PERSON
Alan Turing
British mathematician (1912–1954) whose 1936 formalization of computation defined what a machine could and could not do, whose wartime codebreaking shortened World War II, and whose 1950 paper posed the question that became a field: can machines think?
Alan Mathison Turing was a British mathematician, logician, and computer scientist. His 1936 paper "On Computable Numbers" introduced the theoretical device now called the Turing machine, which remains the standard model of computation. During World War II he led the Bletchley Park effort that broke the German Enigma cipher. His 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" proposed the Imitation Game — now called the Turing Test — as an operational definition of machine intelligence.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Turing is the intellectual founder of artificial intelligence as a rigorous field. Every contemporary conversation about machine intelligence traces back to his 1950 paper, which argued that the question "can a machine think?" should be replaced by a testable question about behavioral indistinguishability.
His earlier computability results define what AI systems can possibly do: Turing showed that any effective procedure can be simulated by a Turing machine, and conversely that some questions are uncomputable. Modern