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Professor
Christopher

Hankin

Director, Institute for Security Science
and Technology. Faculty of Engineering,
Department of Computing

Imperial College, London

Chris Hankin is Director of the Institute for Se- Which are the applications of Turing machines today?
curity Science and Technology and a Professor of Although the classical digital computer architecture is
Computing Science. Professor Hankin was mem- attributed to John von Neumann, the Turing machine is
ber of the high quality scientific team lead by Os- still the underlying abstraction. So in many ways, Turing
car M. Bonastre, deputy director of International machines are still present in every single core processor
Relations at the School of Engineering, which in use today. There is also much work on programming
supported the honorary doctorate to Dr. Paul language expressivity which concerns universality; this
Mockapetris in the Universidad Miguel Hernán- goes back to Turing’s early work on relationships between
dez de Elche. His research is in semantics-based the lambda calculus and his machine – more usually now,
program analysis, language-based computer se- researchers aim to show that their language can be used
curity and data anlytics. He talks about the im- to encode a Turing machine equivalent, often a Random
portant legacy of Alan Turing. Access Machine (RAM) model.

What do you know about the Colossus machine and its
relationship with Alan Turing?
There are many published accounts (and Hollywood films!)
of Turing’s time at Bletchley and anything that I know is
through those or from visits to Bletchley Park.
Do you think you can still improve Turing’s ideas? Why?
There are many variants of Turing machines. Peter Weg-
ner and his colleagues have long argued that interaction
adds a new dimension to the notion of what is computable
– there are a whole series of papers on this going back to
the mid-1990s. Turing machines do seem to capture the
essential features of sequential computation but there
are certainly other models which are more expressive for
concurrent/interactive computation.”

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