Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) / quote 67 of 138
The Church-Turing thesis
Due originally to Alonzo Church (arrived at independently by Turing, so sometimes called the Church-Turing Thesis), this thesis states that any problem that has an algorithmic solution can be solved on a Turing machine. Or another way to say the same thing is that any algorithm at all can be carried out on a Turing machine. The idea of a machine that just uses binary symbols, zeros and ones, is sufficient to carry out any algorithm whatever. This is a very important thesis because it says in mathematical terms that any problem that is computable can be computed on a Turing machine. Any computable function is Turing computable.