Happy Birthday Informatics!

In 1936 Europe was on an inevitable path to World War II, Ecuador declared the Galapagos Islands a national park. In England, a 24 years old mathematician proposed in his whitepaper On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem a solution to the problem of whether there is an algorithm to determine if any given logic statement is valid or not. The interesting thing for us is the path that Alan Turing took to attack the problem: define a symbol processing machine that takes a symbol string input, decides on every symbol, and writes a symbol string output.

Yeah, that's right: input, processing, and output. The Turing Machine is a formalization of our concept of digital computer (actually, any modern day computer can be described in terms of a Turing machine), and with his work Turing defined not only the possibilities but the computing limitations of such a device. For those interested in how a Turing machine works, you can download a simulator written in C#.

The aforementioned whitepaper was proposed by Turing on May 28th, 1936, and I think this is a sound date to be considered as the formal birth of Informatics. At its seventies, ours is an ultra-young engineering with plenty of life to live ahead so ¡Happy Birthday Informatics!

Ah, by the way, whatever happened to the Entscheidungsproblem? Turing proved that it wasn't possible to create an algorithm that could decide whether a theorem was valid or not, in other words: math is harder than programming .