Alan Turing Turing suggested that rather than building a program to simulate the adult mind, it would be better rather to produce a simpler one to simulate a child's mind and then to subject it to a course of education. A reversed form of the Turing test is widely used on the Internet; the CAPTCHA test is intended to determine whether the user is a human or a computer. In 1948 Turing, working with his former undergraduate colleague, D.G. Champernowne, began writing a chess program for a computer that did not yet exist. By 1950, the program was completed and dubbed the
Turing completeness is that there exist problems for which it is impossible to predict what a (Turing-complete) system will do over an arbitrarily long time. The classic example is the halting problem: create an algorithm which takes as input (a) a program in some Turing-complete language, and (b) some data to be fed to "that" program; and which determines whether the program, operating on the input, will eventually stop or will continue forever. It is trivial to create an algorithm that can do this for "some" inputs, but impossible to do this in general. For any characteristic of the program's eventual output,