This week we’ll venture in the realm of theory for a change, starting with Turing machines. In case some of you don’t know what a Turing machine is, here is the Wikipedia definition: “A theoretical ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. The French scholar Pierre-Simon Laplace crisply articulated his expectation that the universe was fully knowable in 1814, asserting that ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: The Busy Beaver number, or BB(n), represents a mathematical problem that tries to calculate the longest possible run-time of a Turing machine ...

Author's rendition of a basic Turing test set-up. Sitting in between two agents (one human and one machine), a person needs to interact with both agents and determine (correctly) which is a machine.

On Christmas Eve, December 24, 2013, Queen Elizabeth II issued a royal pardon to British mathematician Alan Turing. Turing is best known for his development of the Bombe, a machine that successfully ...