The Man Who Changed History Twice in a Single Moment

Meet Alan Turing

The man who changed history twice in a single day.

The first time I heard Alan Turing’s name was in a computer science class where we studied different kinds of basic machines and how they work. One of them was called a Turing machine. Alan invented it.

In modern academia, the focus lies on the theoretical model behind the machine, but this is what his implementation looked like:

The Bombe.

It looks big and clunky and mysterious, but on the inside, you can imagine it a bit like this:

The idea of a Turing machine.

A Turing machine really only does a few things:

• It moves a tape back and forward. The tape has symbols on it, each written down in a single cell.
• The machine reads these symbols, one at a time.
• Then, it decides what outputs to generate based on the inputs it receives.
• Finally, it writes the output on the tape and moves on to the next cell.