  The ACM A.M. Turing Award is commonly acknowledged as the highest distinction
in the realm of computer science. Since 1960s, it has been awarded to computer
scientists who made outstanding contributions. The significance of this award
is far-reaching to the laureates as well as their research teams. However,
unlike the Nobel Prize that has been extensively investigated, little research
has been done to explore this most important award. To this end, we propose the
Turing Number (TN) index to measure how far a specific scholar is to this
award. Inspired by previous works on Erdos Number and Bacon Number, this index
is defined as the shortest path between a given scholar to any Turing Award
Laureate. Experimental results suggest that TN can reflect the closeness of
collaboration between scholars and Turing Award Laureates. With the correlation
analysis between TN and metrics from the bibliometric-level and network-level,
we demonstrate that TN has the potential of reflecting a scholar's academic
influence and reputation.
