"As is often the case in scientific endeavour, Turing was actually working on an entirely different task when he stumbled on a way to create a general-purpose computer.
"The paper that encapsulated this machine? On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.
"The Entscheidungsproblem - which translated from German literally means "decision problem" - referred to a mathematical challenge laid down by German mathematician David Hilbert."