A. M. Turing's ACE Report of 1946 and Other Papers

Volume 10 in the Babbage Reprint Series contains two archival papers by Alan Turing-the ACE report (1945), a seminal paper detailing the design for an electronic universal machine called the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), and Turing's Lecture to the London Mathematical Society (1947) amplifying the ideas outlined in the ACE report. Turing's report was the first time that the notion of artificial intelligence was discussed as a real possibility and Turing went on to devote the next decade to AI. Michael Woodger's paper, The History and Present Use of Digital Computers at the National Physical Laboratory (1958) gives a brief history of the construction of the pilot ACE, the first functional version of Turing's universal machine.