HomeTechZero Day Found Universal Turing Machine - Who Is Alan Turing?

Zero Day Found Universal Turing Machine – Who Is Alan Turing?

The universal Turing machine is basically a theoretical computing device that was invented by Alan M. Turing, a logician and English mathematician in 1936. Basically, this type of machine is utilized in order to accept enumerable languages. According to official reports, all its work depends on a tape of infinite length on which the operations of the reading and writing can be carried out. 

While that’s just an overview of the Zero Day Found Universal Turing Machine, there’s more to know about it. 

Here is some of the most important information that you need to know about the universal Turing machine, how it works, and every other thing that you need to know about this machine! 

Who Is Alan Mathison Turing? 

Basically, Alan Mathison Turing was a mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. He was mostly known for the development of theoretical computer science, which provided a huge formalization of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which is considered to be a model of a general-purpose computer.

Many researchers consider him as the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. He was born in Maide Vale, London. Turing was raised in southern England and graduated from King’s College, Cambridge with a degree in mathematics. He was a fellow at Cambridge and at one point he published a proof that demonstrated some purely mathematical yes or no questions can never be answered by computation and could never be defined as a Turing machine. He also went on to prove that the halting problem for Turing machines is undecidable. 

In the year 1938, he got his Ph.D. from the Department of Mathematics at Princeton University. Throughout World War II, he worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, which was the code-breaking center of Britain and produced intelligence for the military. 

For a lot of time, he led Hut 8, which was the section that was responsible for the German Naval Cryptanalysis. There, he was responsible for creating a technique that sped up the breaking of German ciphers, which included in improving the pre-war Polish bomba method, which was responsible for the Enigma Machine. 

Turing himself played a huge role in cracking and intercepting coded messages that allowed the allies to. Defeat the Axis powers in many crucial engagements, which include the Battle of the Atlantic. After World War II, Turing worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he designed the National Physical Laboratory, where he designed the Automatic Computing Machine, which is considered to be one of the first designs for a stored-program computer.

In the year 1948, Alan Turing joined Max Newman’s Computing Machine Laboratory at the Victoria University of Manchester, where he played a huge role in the development of the Manchester Computers. At this point, he also became interested in mathematical biology. 

He also wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis and predicted the oscillating chemical reactions, which includes the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction, which was first observed in the 1960s. Despite all his accomplishments, Turing was never fully recognized in England throughout his life because almost all of his work was covered by the Official Secrets Act. 

For his death, Turing died on June 7, 1954, which was 16 days before his 42nd birthday.

According to official reports, Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for Homosexual acts. He accepted hormone treatment with DES, a procedure which is known as chemical castration, instead of going to poisoning.

An inquest reportedly determined his death as a suicide, however, it was also noted that the known evidence is also consistent with accidental poisoning.

After a public campaign in 2009, Gordon Brown, a former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, made an official public apology on behalf of the government for how Alan Turing was treated.

In the year 2013, Queen Elizabeth II granted a posthumous pardon. Right now, the term Alan Turing Law is now used informally to refer to a law in 2017 in the UK that pardoned men that were convicted or cautioned under the historical legislation that made homosexual acts as a crime. 

An Overview About The Universal Turing Machine

When it comes to CS (Computer Science), the UTM, which stands for a Universal Turing Machine, is a type of Turing Machine that is capable of simulating an arbitrary Turing Machine on Arbitrary input. This machine achieves this by simply reading both the description of the machine to be simulated as well as the input to that machine from its own tape.

The idea of such a machine was introduced by Alan Turing. It is also that this principle is considered to be the origin of the idea of a stored program computer used by John von Neumann in the year 1946 for the Electronic Computing Instrument, which now bears the name Von Neumann Architecture. 

Also, in terms of computational complexity, a multi-tape Zero Day Found Universal Turing Machine needs to only be slower by a logarithmic factor when compared to the machines that it is simulating. 

How Does Zero Day Found Universal Turing Machine Work? 

The Universal Turing Machine basically computes a certain fixed partial computable function from the input strings over its alphabet and in that sense, it acts like a computer, however with a fixed program.

The machine can encode the action table of any machine in a string, meaning that we can construct a Turing machine that expects on its tape a string that would describe the action table that is followed by a string describing the input tape and computes the tape that the encoded Turing machine would have computed. 

During the 1936 paper on this machine, Alan M. Turing said:

“It is possible to invent the single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence. If this machine U is supplied with a tape on the beginning of which is written the S.D [“standard description” of an action table] of some computing machine M, then U will compute the same sequence as M.”

That’s how the universal Turing machine works.

Do you think we missed out on anything important about the universal Turing machine? Let us know what we missed out by leaving a comment in the comments section below! 

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