Dubai: Google honoured renowned computer scientist and mathematician Dr Alan Turing’s 100th birthday on Saturday with a Turing Machine as a Google doodle.
The internet giant’s latest doodle, an interactive virtual version of the Turing Machine, greeted visitors to its home page and its doodlised version tests the logical abilities of Google users.
It wants users to break a set of six codes and each successful code break adds colour to a letter of the greyed out Google logo on doodle.
A link appears on the doodle explaining visitors that the doodle is for what and clicking on that link will take visitors to a Google Search results page on Alan Turing.
Turing, born June 23, 1912 and died on June 7, 1954, was highly influential in the development of computer science, according to Wikipedia.
Turing is credited for formalising the concepts of “algorithm” and “computation” with the Turing machine, which played a significant role in the creation of the modern computer.
Turing committed suicide in 1954, two weeks before his 42nd birthday, after his homosexuality resulted in a criminal prosecution in 1952.
The Turing Award, first awarded in 1966, is considered to be ‘the Nobel Prize of computing’. The award, given annually by the New York-based Association of Computing Machinery, carries a prize of $250,000, sponsored by Intel and Google.
