Turing machine
nounEtymology Named after English mathematician, logician, and cryptographer Alan Turing (1912–1954), who introduced the concept in 1936 to give a mathematically precise definition of computability. Turing called it an a-machine; the term "Turing machine" was coined by his doctoral advisor Alonzo Church.
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Computing, Computing theory, Engineering, Mathematics, Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Sciences An abstract computing machine that has a finite number of possible internal states and operates on an infinite memory tape by first reading a symbol from a cell in the tape, and then, deterministically, based on that symbol and the machine’s state, writing a symbol in that cell, moving to a neighboring cell, and/or changing state.
- Another class, P, is a subset of NP, and includes all decision problems that can be solved by a (deterministic) Turing machine in polynomial time.2017, Arlindo Oliveira, The Digital Mind: How Science Is Redefining Humanity, MIT Press, →ISBN, page 81:
- Related terms
- functionally complete