[michael_dorfman]

But his paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” (the one that gave the world the Turing Machine) has a bug in it. In fact, it has two. The first is obvious enough that I spotted it when i read the paper for the first time. The second bug is rather more subtle (but still fixable. It’s okay, the field of computing is not build on sand).

I'd love to see the identification of these-- it seems quite perverse to mention them in a blog posting without at least a footnote giving the details.

[praptak]

There was not enough space on the margin of Turing's paper to describe the bug.

[pdcawley]

Where's the fun in that? The first bug is pretty blatant and will leap out at you if you're reading the paper closely (it's of the order of a syntax error). Describing the second would have taken too much space, diverted from the thrust of the post and, most pertinently, required digging a book out of one of far too many identical, poorly labelled, cardboard boxes.

[evolve2k]

Anyone have link to the paper?

[bru]

There you go: www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Turing_Paper_1936.pdf

[ColinWright]

Clickable: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Turing_Paper_1936.pdf