Alan Turing exhibit at The Science Musuem

Ashleigh reported on an exhibit at The Science Museum
On July 2^nd we visited the Science Museum where there was an exhibit on Alan Turing’s Life and Legacy. Alex Turing was a major influence in my field of computer science where he created concepts of algorithms and computation with the Turing machine, which models a computer and is still used today for breaking down complex problems into computable parts. He is often considered the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. In this exhibit I got to see Turing’s ‘electronic brain’, the Pilot ACE computer, which was groundbreaking and one of the first stored-program computers designed. 
I also learned about Turing’s history in programming computers. In 1948 Turing moved to Manchester University to lead the software development and wrote a programmers handbook. Pages from this handbook were displayed in this exhibit as well. The exhibit also held other pieces of history preceding Turing, one being a mechanical logic machine developed in 1869 by William Jevons. 
I was interested to learn that before Alan Turing pioneered computing machines that ‘computers’ were usually women working with simple calculating machine to solve a large range of problems as a part of the Scientific Computing Service by Leslie Comrie in 1937. Finally, throughout the exhibit Turing’s interesting and tragic life, which ended with his death in 1954 from cyanide poisoning, was displayed. 
Attached to this exhibit was a small exhibit containing machines that distilled the basics of programming to reveal how computer programs work directly affecting a visual object in response to changes in the program code. For example, there was a machine that represented variables where depending on the variables you entered the arms of a wooden tree would be displayed differently.  I really enjoyed the exhibit and learned a lot behind the history of modern day computer science.