Can a computer solve every problem?
Alan Turing
Can a computer solve every problem?
Imagine you're trying to find the best route for a road trip, with countless possible paths and destinations. You want to know if there's a way to always pick the best one.
There's a limit to what a computer can figure out. Some problems are too complex or too infinite to be solved by any set of instructions.
Example
You can't write a program to find the absolute best road trip route because there are too many possibilities and no clear way to measure "best."
Remember this
Alan Turing proved the concept of undecidable problems, showing that not every problem can be solved by an algorithm.
Text adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Related concepts
History of mathematics
Did you know a machine can mimic any calculation?
Universal Turing machine
Alan Turing introduced the Turing machine in 1936
Kurt Gödel
Kurt Gödel proved incompleteness theorems
Quantum mind
Can quantum computers solve puzzles faster than our brains?
Halting problem
Alan Turing proved the halting problem is undecidable
History of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system
Why did ancient scholars invent a new way to count?
Swipe through more Discover concepts
Open Pocket Polymath