I see your point (I sometimes get the same feeling), but if you think about it, it’d be much more astonishing if someone built a universal computer before having the idea of a universal computer. It’s not really common to build something much more complex than a hand ax by accident. Natural phenomena are often discovered like that, but machines are usually imagined a long time before we can actually build them.
Yeah, that’s a good point. Turing must have been one of the first people to realize that there’s a “maximum amount of flexibility” a computer can have, so to speak, where it’s so flexible it can do anything that any computer can.
I see your point (I sometimes get the same feeling), but if you think about it, it’d be much more astonishing if someone built a universal computer before having the idea of a universal computer. It’s not really common to build something much more complex than a hand ax by accident. Natural phenomena are often discovered like that, but machines are usually imagined a long time before we can actually build them.
Yeah, that’s a good point. Turing must have been one of the first people to realize that there’s a “maximum amount of flexibility” a computer can have, so to speak, where it’s so flexible it can do anything that any computer can.