Reflections upon Turing’s analysis of the process of computation and its relation to AI

Abstract

From today’s point of view, Turing — in his influential paper of 1936¹ — was concerned with grasping the epistemological concept of effectively computable functions within the frame of the then mathematical research. Turing talks (resp. writes) of computable numbers, yet already in the introduction to his paper he hints at a possible extension of his appraoch: “it is almost equally easy to define and investigate computable functions of an integral variable or a real computable variable, computable predicates and so forth.” [230, my emphasis]