The Universal Turing Machine: A Half-Century Survey. [first edition]

Product Description

This volume commemorates the work of Alan Turing, who not only introduced the most persuasive and influential concept of a machine model of effective computability but also anticipated in his work contemporary debates about the extent and limitations of mechanistic explanations of nature. Turing's paper "On Computable Numbers, With an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" appeared in 1937. It contained Turing's thesis that every "effective" computation can be programmed on a Turing machine. Furthermore it contained the unsolvability of both the halting problem and the decision problem for first-order logic, and it presented the invention of the universal Turing machine. The publication o…