Abstract
FOLLOWING upon Lord Mountbattens presidential address to the Institution of Radio Engineers, in which he referred to the E.N.I.A.C. (described in an article in Nature of October 12, p. 500), a statement was issued from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research stating that plans for a machine to be called the Automatic Computing Engine (A.C.E.) are being completed at the National Physical Laboratory. A short statement about this machine was broadcast by Sir Charles Darwin, director of the National Physical Laboratory, in the B.B.C. Home Service on November 9. While paper plans have made good progress, the technical design is only beginning, and it will be a year or two before any units are operating. The completion of the machine will take several years. The project is under the charge of Mr. J. R. Womersley, superintendent of the Mathematics Division, and the machine will form part of the Divisions equipment. The team of mathematicians who are planning the machine is led by Dr. A. M. Turing, formerly a fellow of King College, Cam bridge, in whose paper On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem (Proc. Lond. Math. Soc, 1937), the possibility of such machines is foreseen, and methods of organising work on them are discussed.
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An Automatic Computing Engine for the National Physical Laboratory. Nature 158, 827 (1946). https://doi.org/10.1038/158827e0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/158827e0