More specifically, it can be said that as a mathematician he applied the concept of algorithm to the digital computer and, his investigation of the relationship between machines and nature, created the field of artificial intelligence.
Interested only in mathematics and science, he began his career as a mathematician at Kings College, Cambridge University in 1931.
In school he was very successful, given his tendency to delve exclusively into things that seriously interested him. Only his great friendship with Christopher Morcom allowed him to start his university career: his friend, however, died of tuberculosis two years later. But the mark it left on his soul was deep and significant, inducing Turing to find within himself the determination to continue his studies and research.
The great moral support and encouragement that Morcom gave him, induced a great mind like that of Turing, to develop its immense potential. As an example, he discovered, five years before Gödel, that the axioms of mathematics could not be complete, an intuition that put into crisis the belief that mathematics, as a perfectly rational science, was exempt from any criticism.
He then moved to Princeton University, where he began to explore what would later be defined as the “turing machine“, which, in other words, was nothing more than a primitive and primal” prototype “of the modern computer. Turing it was to “break” the instruction to be given to the machine, into a number of simple instructions, in the belief that it could develop an algorithm for each problem: a process not dissimilar to what programmers do today.
During world war II, Turing He put his mathematical skills at the service of the English “Directorate-General for Communication”, to decipher the codes used in German communications, a particularly difficult task because the Germans had developed a device called “Enigma“which was capable of generating a constantly changing code. During this period, in the” Communications Department “, Turing and his colleagues worked with a tool called “Colossus“which quickly and efficiently cracked the German codes created with” Enigma. “It was, in essence, a set of servomotors and metal, but it was the first step towards the digital computer.
After this fundamental contribution to the war effort, after the war ended, he continued working for the “National Physics Laboratory” (NPL), continuing his research in the field of digital computers. He worked on the development of the “Automatic Computing Engine“(ACE), one of the first attempts to create a true digital computer. It was during this period that he began to explore the relationship between computers and nature. He wrote an article titled”Intelligent Machinery“, finally published in 1969. This was one of the first times the concept of”artificial intelligence“. TuringIn fact, it was based on the idea that machines could be created that were capable of simulating the processes of the human brain, supported by the belief that there is nothing, in theory, that an artificial brain cannot do, exactly like the human brain. human being.
The mathematician left the National Physical Laboratory before the “Automatic Computing Engine” was completed and moved to the University of Manchester, where he worked on the realization of the Manchester Automatic Digital Machine (MADAM), with the dream of being able to see in the long term, the chimera of artificial intelligence finally realized.