The Turing machine was invented in 1936 by Alan Turing, who called it an "a-machine" (automatic machine). With this model, Turing was able to answer two questions in the negative: (1) Does a machine exist that can determine whether any arbitrary machine on its tape is "circular" (e.g., freezes, or fails to continue its computational task)? Similarly, (2) does a machine exist that can determine whether any arbitrary machine on its tape ever prints a given symbol? Thus by providing a mathematical description of a very simple device capable of arbitrary computations, he was able to prove properties of computation in general—and in particular, the uncomputability of the "Entscheidungsproblem" ('decision problem').