CONTRIBUTI / 1 / Simone Pinna, Marco Giunti /
The work of Alan Turing (1936) set a milestone for the foundation of the concept of algorithm by grounding the notion of effective procedure on a special type of real cognitive phenomenon, namely, that of a human being performing rule-based symbolic transformations with the only aid of paper and pencil. In this work, after a brief historical overview, we show how Turing arrived at a negative solution of the decidability problem for first-order logic and in which sense Turing’s explication of the intuitive concept of effective procedure is sufficient to justify Church’s Thesis. We then present a cognitive interpretation of Turing’s theory of computation, according to which Turing machines are viewed as models of real phenomena of mind-environment interaction.
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