took inspiration from Alan Turing, the twentieth-century British computer scientist who came up with the Turing machine. Introduced in 1936, it was essentially a thought experiment, a “machine” that only ever existed in Turing’s mind. He envisioned a length of infinite tape that was divided into cells, as well as a tape head that could read and write symbols on the tape, guided by certain rules, until it was told to stop. The idea sounds rudimentary, but as a theory, it was critical in formalizing the concept that computers could use algorithms—or sets of rules—to do things. Given enough time
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