Alan Turing’s name is sure to come more often as progress on artificial intelligence will produce machines increasingly capable of independent reason and thought. When computers were little more than calculators, performing statistical or tax computation, he pioneered the science of computers as “Turing machines,” capable of solving any problem if that problem could be turned into a machine-readable algorithm.

On this day, Mary 28, in 1936, Alan Turing submitted his paper, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” which contained his thesis that machines could be capable of any calculation, if presented in the right way. Turing’s ideas revolutionized the field of computer science.

But Turning did more than just propose the ideas; he actually worked out the fine details of a such a computational machine. He demonstrated on his paper the internal states of the machine could represent logic values or letters as easily as numbers. Anything that could be represented symbolically could be processed. The machines could in a sense “think,” said Turing. “We may compare a processor with a human mind whose memory is necessarily limited to remembering a finite amount of numbers and perform a finite amount of operations.”