J. Kemeny. Man Viewed as a Machine.

J. Kemeny. Man Viewed as a Machine. Scientific American, Vol. 192, No. 4, 1955.

This is a wonderful article about the advent of the "Turing Machine" concept in the 1950s.

It is yet another example in which logical and physical machines are conflated (from today's perspective):

"Turing's machines may be clumsy and slow, ..." [p.60]

"... this slows the universal machine down considerably." [p.61] 

A pure mathematician today would presumably insist that each operation of a logical machine takes no time at all; see e.g. Paul Henry's Mathematical Machines in the book entitled: The Machine as Metaphor and Tool, edited by Haken et al., Springer-Verlag 1993.

[Last updated: 31 August 2020]

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