Alan Turing is considered to be the first ever computer scientist to have ever existed. With his talents, he received a scholarship at Cambridge University and became a man ahead of his time. Soon after he made the world-renowned Turing Machine. I found this machine to be quite exceptional as it was the first computer to have ever been made and although it did require very basic instructions, it was the founding father of technology today.
The Turing Machine had 3 different actions. First, it read the number in front of the machine which could either be a 1, 0, or blank space which is considered a 0. Then it could either change the value to something else or leave it. Finally, it would move left or right to follow its next set of instructions and see a new number.
In my AP Computer Science class, my teacher wanted us to start from the very basics and understand the 1s and 0s behind a computer and how they work. She assigned us a very simple yet complicated problem to solve. We had to get a 0 in the center of the list of numbers and have an indefinite amount of ones on both sides of the 0. At first, this sounds quite doable. However, after learning the limited capabilities the turning machine had, to tell the machine to go an infinite amount of spaces to the right, draw the number one, and then move twice the infinite amount of spaces to the left and draw another one is hard when telling the machine to move one space at a time.
I am still working on solving this problem but I am determined to figure this out! Even though this machine is quite a handful and may not be the most efficient in today’s world, to imagine that this computer is what caused us to have such advanced computers today amazes me!
