Alan Turing
In Our Time: Science
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Sir Turring's Proof That There Is No Algorithm for the Incidens Problem
Sir turring actually proved that there was no m algorithm for the incidens problem. What he actually did as he studied a different problem called the halting problem. He builds a turring machine that cannot exist, ok. So we've had a universal machine an. I can now m give the proof. And it uses an idea that goes all the way back to aristotle called proof by contradiction. If you want to prove that something is true, what you do is you assume that it's false. You work out the consequences until you arrive at something that's just wrong. When you get there, you know that your assumption was false. That contradiction means the original assumption must have been
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