Alan Turing's Automatic Computing Engine
The Master Codebreaker's Struggle to build the Modern Computer
Copeland, B. Jack Professor of Philosophy at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand
Print publication date: 2005 (this edition)
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2008
Print ISBN-13: 978-0-19-856593-2




7 From Turing machine to ‘electronic brain’
doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198565932.003.0008

Teresa Numerico
Abstract: This chapter examines the relationships and differences between the various machines that Alan M. Turing developed in fields ranging from logic and the theory of computability to cryptanalysis, computer science, and artificial intelligence. Topics covered include Turing's role in the Enigma decryption project during the Second World War, the ACE project, and relationships between Turing and various US groups. Turing's project is compared with von Neumann's to highlight their similarities and differences.

Keywords: Alan M. Turing, computers, codebreaking, programming, ACE, von Neumann,

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Contents
 
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Full Book Contents
Introduction
Part I The National Physical Laboratory and the ACE Project
1 The National Physical Laboratory
2 The creation of the NPL Mathematics Division
3 The origins and development of the ACE project
4 The Pilot ACE at the National Physical Laboratory
Part II Turing and the History of Computing
5 Turing and the computer
6 The ACE and the shaping of British computing
7 From Turing machine to ‘electronic brain’
8 Computer architecture and the ACE computers
Part III The ACE Computers
9 The Pilot ACE instruction format
10 Programming the Pilot ACE
11 The Pilot ACE: from concept to reality
12 Applications of the Pilot ACE and the DEUCE
13 The ACE Test Assembly, the Pilot ACE, the Big ACE, and the Bendix G15
14 The DEUCE—a user's view
15 The ACE Simulator and the Cybernetic Model
16 The Pilot Model and the Big ACE on the web
Part IV Electronics
17 How valves work
18 Recollections of early vacuum tube circuits
19 Circuit design of the Pilot ACE and the Big ACE
Part V Technical Reports and Lectures on the ACE 1945–47
20 Proposed electronic calculator (1945)
21 Notes on memory (1945)
22 The Turing–Wilkinson lecture series (1946–7)
23 The state of the art in electronic digital computing in Britain and the United States (1947)
Index
 
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