Subject areaArtificial intelligence
Also known asuniversal Turing machine
The Turing machine is the abstract model of computation that Alan Turing described in 1936 in the paper On Computable Numbers.
It is an imaginary machine, designed to state precisely what "computing by following a procedure" means, and it has three elements:
- a tape divided into cells, on which symbols are read and written;
- a head, which reads one cell at a time and moves left or right;
- a table of rules, which for every state and every symbol read says what to write, where to move and which state to enter.
The decisive step is the universal machine: a Turing machine that reads on its tape the description of another machine and carries out its work. It follows that a single device can perform any procedure described to it, and this is the principle of the stored-program computer. Earlier technologies of intelligence, such as the pinwheel calculator, perform only the operations they are built for.
Source: A. M. Turing, On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 1936.
An example
The case below is constructed, because the term does not yet appear in the articles. In a bank the same computer calculates mortgage interest in the morning and checks suspicious transactions in the afternoon: only the loaded program changes. It is the idea of Turing's universal machine applied to the office.
Enrico Giubertoni. Licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0: you may quote, translate and adapt this entry with the author’s name and a link, stating any changes. For commercial use, write to info@enricogiubertoni.com
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