From Turing machine to morphogenesis: Forming and informing computation

Abstract

Information is complicated. It shares its existence with the material world around us. Language has enabled us to describe relationships governing embodied information, without losing the sense of mystery. Newton replaced the soft descriptive touch with the predictive precision of mathematical computation. And action at a distance converted the informational complexity of mechanical interaction into the mathematical tidiness of computational relations over number systems. The paradigm toughened and it was nearly 400 years later that Alan Turing stepped into this scientific setting, and gave it a logical form and that became a catch-all for some, and a reductio ad absurdum for those who failed to matched it to the wider realities of the natural universe. Alan Turing subscribed to both views, and his involvement changed the way we engage with them for ever. This article is an Alan Turing Centenary tracing of part of the story. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.