
A memorial plaque was established at the place of his birth in London that calls him a wartime codebreaker and a father of computer science. It is all true: today, Turing is recognized as one of the founders of theory of artificial intelligence and computer science, the author of the very word “computer” in its modern sense – before Turing they used this word for human estimators. In 1936, he described a universal computing machine designed to solve any mathematical and logical problems – the very famous “Turing machine” which is the basis of the theory of algorithms studied by many generations of computer scientists and programmers. And Turing certainly was a hacker: he revealed the secret of German codes and thereby introduced a tangible contribution to the victory over fascism. Well, after the war he raised the question “Can machines think?” and developed a special Turing test to determine this ability in a computer. Today, Turing's name bears the most prestigious award in the field of computer science, a kind of a computer version of the Nobel Prize.