Turing's Legacy

Alan Turing died on June 7, 1954 — but his birthday on June 23 is also a day to reflect on what he left behind. The Turing Award — computing's Nobel Prize, given since 1966 — honours his name. The Turing test, proposed in his 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, sparked decades of debate about machine intelligence. His universal machine concept — that one machine can simulate any other — is the conceptual foundation of all general-purpose computing. Every time you run a program, you are using a Turing machine.