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In an old textbook I haven't been able to find again (browsing in another uni's library) regarding the Entscheidungsproblem I read that Church wrote to Turing, saying he thought the Turing Machine waa a more convincing/natural/intuitive representation of how mathematicians thought about algorithms than his own lambda calculus.

Maybe he was just being modest, or like John McCarthy, just didn't see or believe its potential.

Note that this was before computers or programming, and that there's no formal proof that a Turning machine can encode any computation - so its convincingness was important.




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