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Saturday, February 22, 2014

And yet, he can't be ignored

Alan Turing's seminal paper was littered with errors,
according to Donald Davies, who worked with Turing on development of an electronic computer.

Davies referred to the mistakes in On computable numbers, with an application to the entscheidungsproblem as routine "programing errors," though he argued that one of them strongly affected Turing's undecidability proof.

Turing had corrected a few errors shortly after publication of his paper, but, said Davies, was quite annoyed by Davies's list of proposed corrections, with Turing arguing that the flubs did not affect the conceptual proof.

http://books.google.com/books?id=7sEbjfnVWREC&pg=PP149&lpg=PP149&dq=turing%27s+%22programming+errors%22&source=bl&ots=Eis2SSSd5z&sig=nCpfSR5Wxf2cINI9lwDno87bckw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=RwIJU4-wBIPlyQGd6oHYDA&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=turing%27s%20%22programming%20errors%22&f=false

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