For something that has been around since the 1930s and is so foundational to computer science, you’d think that the Turing machine, an abstraction for mechanical computation, would be easily ...

In computational complexity theory, P and NP are two classes of problems. P is the class of decision problems that a deterministic Turing machine can solve in polynomial time. In useful terms, any ...

IN 1935, Alan Turing set out to build a reputation by outflanking the world’s leading mathematician. Turing was 22 years old, and a new fellow at Cambridge. His target, David Hilbert, was the ...

Turing machines are widely believed to be universal, in the sense that any computation done by any system can also be done by a Turing machine. In a new article, researchers present their work ...

Once upon a time, over 40 years ago, a horde of computer scientists descended on the West German city of Dortmund. They were competing to catch an elusive quarry — only four of its kind had ever been ...

As a practising computer scientist, I thought I had a fairly good grasp of Alan Turing’s many contributions to the field. But The Turing Guide, by Jack Copeland, Jonathan Bowen, Mark Sprevak and Robin ...