Digital Humanities Series: Oleksiy Al-saadi, "What is Computation? The Philosophy of Turing Machines," March 4th, 5:30PM, Zoom

Announced on: Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2026

Digital Humanities Series: Oleksiy Al-saadi
Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science

"What is Computation? The Philosophy of Turing Machines"
Wednesday, March 4 at 5:30 p.m., on Zoom

Zoom link: https://csuchico.zoom.us/j/88561594318?pwd=MW5CZHpVRHUyOERSRW1WOVpOc09rZz09#success

In the 1930s, Alan Turing and Alonzo Church introduced a minimal model of computation that, in terms of expressive power, is able to compute anything a modern-day computer can. Church's statement, "There is no algorithm unless it can be computed by such a machine", has formed the basis to how we can even understand what problems can be computed. In this talk, we expound on the digital of "Digital Humanities". We discuss types of Turing Machines and their ability to model human solvability of certain games. Then, we discuss why, despite the universal acceptance of the Church-Turing thesis, it has never actually been proven.

Dr. Al-Saadi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Chico State, where he also did his B.A. before receiving a Ph.D from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln on distance and domination properties in graph theory. His work focuses on theoretical computer science and the study of finding faster, algorithmic solutions to challenging problems under certain restrictions. He also has great interest in reductions, a way of showing that one hard problem is really another hard problem in disguise.

To learn more about the Humanities Center, contact Erin Kelly at ekkelly@csuchico.edu or visit https://www.csuchico.edu/academics/college/humanities-fine-arts/events/humanities-center/index.shtml.