What Is Turing Machine?

Turing machine was not actually a machine. It was a hypothetical computing device. Alan Mathison Turing proposed this kind of hypothetical device in the year 1936. The Turing machine was actually an idealized mathematical model. It reduced the logical structure of any computing device to its essential form. The idealized mathematical model which was named by its creator consisted of an infinitely extensible tape and a modifiable control mechanism. The tape head was capable of performing various operations through the tape. The modifiable control mechanism was to store instructions. As predicted by Alan M. Turing, the machine performed the functions in a progression of separate steps.

Alan M. Turing's extrapolation of the crucial features of Information Processing was instrumental in the progress of modern digital computers. Modern digital computers share Turing's basic scheme of an input/output device which was supposed to be formed from tape and the tape reader in his original concept. It also shared the control mechanism as a central processing unit or CPU to store memory.