How Alan Turing set the rules for computing

10.07.2012
The 13th and 14th paragraphs of the June 22 story, "How Alan Turing set the rules for computing," conflate two different ideas that can be misconstrued as a single idea. As they are not critical to the story, those paragraphs have been removed from the story on the newswire.

The original paragraphs that should be removed read, in order:

Thanks to Turing, "any algorithm that manipulates a finite set of symbols is considered a computational procedure," Pettey said in an interview via email.

Conversely, anything that cannot be modeled in a Turing Machine could not run on a computer, which is vital information for software design. "If you know that your problem is intractable, and you don't have an exponential amount of time to wait for an answer, then you'd better focus on figuring out a way to find an acceptable alternative instead of wasting time trying to find the actual answer," Pettey said.