Widely considered one of the founding fathers of AI and theoretical computer science, the British mathematician and logician Alan Turing was a notable figure. He basically created the conceptual framework for digital computation that followed after it, with his fundamental work in the 1930s. Of his many significant contributions, the Turing machine is the most important – a theoretical model of computation through which he explicated the basic principles of algorithms and computing.
The Turing machine is a very abstract model; it consists of only three elements: a tape, a head, and a set of rules. It disregards all the circuits and high-tech materials that one would normally think of. It turns out that this machine can be viewed as a very powerful idea indeed. The main thing is that Turing showed that for any problem that can be solved by a step-by-step procedure or an algorithm can be computed by this machine. Essentially, Turing introduced what formal computation theoretically meant, which would have remained unfulfilled without the traditional answer. In other words, he gave a very clear definition of what it is to be computable and in this way, he defined the very limits of what is possible for machines to accomplish.
This theoretical framework was instrumental in the actual digital computer development. Turing’s work transitioned the idea of computation from a human process to a mechanical one. The concept of a ‘universal machine’ that could do any task by merely altering its instruction was directly the foreseeing of the stored-program idea at the basis of all the current machines. He initially set them as a remote, logical reference, but his ideas gave the logical reference frame that later engineers and computer scientists used in creating the mechanical devices that have gone on to digitize anything from the internet and business to astronomy and the arts.