Fwd: "Turing machine, n." - Word of the Day from the OED

[Dave Monroe]

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From:  <oedwotd at oup.com>
Date: Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 7:30 PM
Subject: "Turing machine, n." - Word of the Day from the OED
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Your word for today is: Turing machine, n.

Turing machine, n.
Pronunciation:/ˈtjʊərɪŋ/
Etymology: < the name of A. M. Turing (1912–54), English
mathematician, who described such a machine in 1936.
  A notional computing machine for performing simple reading, writing,
and shifting operations in accordance with a prescribed set of rules,
invoked in theories of computability and automata.
It is represented as a scanner that has a number of internal states
and moves left or right along a tape on which is a sequence of
symbols. The symbol read and the state of the scanner determine (in
accordance with the rules) what replacement symbol is written, what
new state the scanner enters, and what move it makes along the tape
before the cycle is repeated.
1937 Jrnl. Symbolic Logic 2 43 [Abstract of Turing's paper.] Certain
further restrictions are imposed on the character of the machine, but
these are of such a nature as obviously to cause no loss of
generality—in particular, a human calculator, provided with pencil and
paper and explicit instructions, can be regarded as a kind of Turing
machine.
1955 Sci Amer. Apr. 62/1 To understand a Turing machine we need only
know its table of commands.
1961 Proc. Symposium Appl. Math. 12 39 A Turing machine plus random
elements is a reasonable model for the human brain.
1969  P. B. Jordain Condensed Computer Encycl. 550 No Turing machine
has ever been physically constructed or realized in hardware as a
device for its own sake, but general-purpose digital computers have
been programmed to simulate Turing machines.
1984 Sci. Amer. May 70/1 Beginning with the intuitive idea that a
method is an algorithm—a procedure that can be mechanically carried
out without creative intervention—he [sc. A. M. Turing] showed how the
idea can be refined into a detailed model of the process of
computation in which any algorithm is broken down into a sequence of
simple, atomic steps. The resulting model of computation is the
logical construct called a Turing machine.

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