Alan Turning and Googles PageRank Algorithm
Source: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/imitation-game-alan-turing\
This article from the New Yorker begins with a discussion of the movie “The Imitation Game”. This movie is centered around Alan Turing and the work he did during WWII to break enigma. Though the movie is focused more on Turing’s life and his work during the war, throughout his life, Turing had many other accomplishments in addition to breaking enigma. Accomplishments that have made him thought of in this day and age as the father of computer science. One aspect of his work that the article details on is a mathematics paper Turing wrote that “explores the reliability of certain algorithms that would later be central to computations for things like the PageRank algorithm” (Rockmore). The PageRank algorithm is the basis for search engines such as Google, and the implementation of this algorithm is what has brought Google such widespread success and use.
In class, we have been discussing the how search engines such as Google decide what webpages to offer up to the user first, second, third, etc. out of the multitude of available websites for any given topic. This is where the PageRank algorithm comes into play. There are many different factors that play into deciding which results are most relevant to a users search. The PageRank algorithm is used to make this distinction and rank of the search results. As it turns out, as told to us by the article, Alan Turing theorized the capability and reliability of such an algorithm.