Alan Mathison Turing was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. He is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.
Colossus was a set of computers developed by British codebreakers in the years 1943–1945 to help in the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. Colossus used thermionic valves to perform Boolean and counting operations. Colossus is thus regarded as the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer, although it was programmed by switches and plugs and not by a stored program.
Maxwell Herman Alexander Newman, FRS,, generally known as Max Newman, was a British mathematician and codebreaker. His work in World War II led to the construction of Colossus, the world's first operational, programmable electronic computer, and he established the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory at the University of Manchester, which produced the world's first working, stored-program electronic computer in 1948, the Manchester Baby.
A stored-program computer is a computer that stores program instructions in electronically or optically accessible memory. This contrasts with systems that stored the program instructions with plugboards or similar mechanisms.
The von Neumann architecture—also known as the von Neumann model or Princeton architecture—is a computer architecture based on a 1945 description by John von Neumann, and by others, in the First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC. The document describes a design architecture for an electronic digital computer with these components:
The Manchester Baby, also called the Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM), was the first electronic stored-program computer. It was built at the University of Manchester by Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn, and Geoff Tootill, and ran its first program on 21 June 1948.
Thomas Harold Flowers MBE was an English engineer with the British General Post Office. During World War II, Flowers designed and built Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic computer, to help decipher encrypted German messages.
The Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) was a British early electronic serial stored-program computer design by Alan Turing. Turing completed the ambitious design in late 1945, having had experience in the years prior with the secret Colossus computer at Bletchley Park.
Donald Michie was a British researcher in artificial intelligence. During World War II, Michie worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, contributing to the effort to solve "Tunny", a German teleprinter cipher.
Brian Edward Carpenter is a British Internet engineer and a former chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), and the Internet Society.
Peter John Hilton was a British mathematician, noted for his contributions to homotopy theory and for code-breaking during World War II.
Charles Eryl Wynn-Williams, was a Welsh physicist, noted for his research on electronic instrumentation for use in nuclear physics. His work on the scale-of-two counter contributed to the development of the modern computer.
The philosophy of computer science is concerned with the philosophical questions that arise within the study of computer science. There is still no common understanding of the content, aims, focus, or topics of the philosophy of computer science, despite some attempts to develop a philosophy of computer science like the philosophy of physics or the philosophy of mathematics. Due to the abstract nature of computer programs and the technological ambitions of computer science, many of the conceptual questions of the philosophy of computer science are also comparable to the philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, and the philosophy of technology.
The Alan Turing Centenary Conference was an academic conference celebrating the life and research of Alan Turing by bringing together distinguished scientists to understand and analyse the history and development of Computer Science and Artificial intelligence.
The Turing Guide, written by Jack Copeland, Jonathan Bowen, Mark Sprevak, Robin Wilson, and others and published in 2017, is a book about the work and life of the British mathematician, philosopher, and early computer scientist, Alan Turing (1912–1954).
Sir John Dermot Turing, 12th Baronet is a British solicitor and author.
Robert William Doran HFNZCS was a New Zealand-based computer scientist and historian of computing. He was Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Catherine Mary Caughey used Colossus computers for codebreaking at Bletchley Park during World War II.
Professor Oron Shagrir is an Israeli philosopher and cognitive scientist.
Turochamp is a chess program developed by Alan Turing and David Champernowne in 1948. It was created as part of research by the pair into computer science and machine learning. Turochamp is capable of playing an entire chess game against a human player at a low level of play by calculating all potential moves and all potential player moves in response, as well as some further moves it deems considerable. It then assigns point values to each game state, and selects the move resulting in the highest point value.
