Turing Machine

Turing machine, hypothetical computing device introduced in 1936 by the English mathematician and logician Alan M. Turing. Turing originally conceived the machine as a mathematical tool that could infallibly recognize undecidable propositions—i.e., those mathematical statements that, within a given formal axiom system, cannot be shown to be either true or false. (The mathematician Kurt Gödel had demonstrated that such undecidable propositions exist in any system powerful enough to contain arithmetic.) Turing instead proved that there can never exist any universal algorithmic method for determining whether a proposition is undecidable.

The Turing machine is not a machine in the ordinary sense but rather an idealized mathematical model that reduces the logical structure of any computing device to its essentials. As envisaged by Turing, the machine performs its functions in a sequence of discrete steps and assumes only one of a finite list of internal states at any given moment. The machine itself consists of an infinitely extensible tape, a tape head that is capable of performing various operations on the tape, and a modifiable control mechanism in the head that can store directions from a finite set of instructions. The tape is divided into squares, each of which is either blank or has printed on it one of a finite number of symbols. The tape head has the ability to move to, read, write, and erase any single square and can also change to another internal state at any moment. Any such act is determined by the internal state of the machine and the condition of the scanned square at a given moment. The output of the machine—i.e., the solution to a mathematical query—can be read from the system once the machine has stopped. (However, in the case of Gödel’s undecidable propositions, the machine would never stop, and this became known as the “halting problem.”)

By incorporating all the essential features of information processing, the Turing machine became the basis for all subsequent digital computers, which share the machine’s basic scheme of an input/output device (tape and reader), memory (control mechanism’s storage), and central processing unit (control mechanism).