My memory from reading Andrew Hodges’ authoritative biography of Turing is that his theory was designed as a tool to solve the Entscheidungsproblem, which was a pure mathematical problem posed by Hilbert. It just happened to be a convenient formalism for others later on. GPT-5 agrees with me.
My memory from reading Andrew Hodges’ authoritative biography of Turing is that his theory was designed as a tool to solve the Entscheidungsproblem, which was a pure mathematical problem posed by Hilbert. It just happened to be a convenient formalism for others later on. GPT-5 agrees with me.