Read more: "Instant Expert: Alan Turing's legacy"
Alan Turing was a visionary thinker on artificial intelligence (AI), devising the Turing test, which is still used as a key gauge of how close machines have come to human intelligence. He also published prescient ideas about simulating a brain with computers.
Toward the end of his life, he was also beginning tantalising work in biology, devising a mathematical theory of "morphogenesis" - in essence, how a leopard gets its spots
Turing was curious about the brain. He believed that the infant brain could be simulated on a computer. In 1948, he wrote a report arguing for his theory, and in doing so gave an early description of the artificial neural networks used to simulate neurons today.
His paper was prescient, but was not published until 1968 - years after his death - in part because his supervisor at the ...
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