Information Pioneers Alan Turing

Published: July 2, 2010, 7 a.m.

Cambridge, 1936. While the world was being shaped by events in Europe - the Spanish Civil War, the Nazis retaking the Rhineland - Alan Turing, a young mathematician, completes a new theory in his rooms in Cambridge. This theory was originally described as an imaginary machine, to crunch imaginary numbers, but it went on to be the origin of Artificial Intelligence as we now know it. Turing was the first to understand that computers could learn and adapt to new stimuli, just as we humans can, it was just a matter of giving them the right tools in the first place. Much like teaching a child to cross the road, Turing set about creating Artificial Intelligence in his machines. Today, self-parking cars, self-flying planes, even the Mars rover are all descendants of Turing's Machine.