On the other hand George Dyson's book "Turing's Cathedral" makes a compelling case that the group at Princeton building the IAS Machine (https://en.wikipedia.or

On the other hand George Dyson's book "Turing's Cathedral" makes a compelling case that the group at Princeton building the IAS Machine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAS_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAS_machine), Von Neumann included, believed they were following Turing's paper quite directly. p.152: According to Bigelow, the forty-fold parallel architecture, despite its deviations, was descended directly from the pure-serial Turing Machine. “Turing’s machine does not sound much like a modern computer today, but nevertheless it was,” Bigelow explains. “It was the germinal idea. If you build an apparatus which will obey certain explicit orders in a certain explicit fashion, can you say anything about the kinds of computational or intellectual processes which it can or cannot do?” Bigelow and von Neumann had lengthy discussions about the implications of Gödel’s and Turing’s work. “Von Neumann understood this very deeply,” Bigelow confirms. “So when looking at ENIAC, or some of the early machines which were very inflexible, he saw better than any other man that this was just the first step, and that great improvement would come.” p.259: The war had scrambled the origins of new inventions as completely as a message passing through an Enigma machine. Radar, cryptanalysis, antiaircraft fire control, computers, and nuclear weapons were all secret wartime projects that, behind the security barriers, enjoyed the benefit of free exchange of ideas, without concern for individual authorship or peer review. Von Neumann served the role of messenger RNA, helping to convey the best of the ideas—including the powers of Turing’s Universal Machine. Among the bound volumes of the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, on the shelves of the Institute for Advanced Study library, there is one volume whose binding is disintegrated from having been handled so many times: Volume 42, with Turing’s “On Computable Numbers,” on pages 230–65. (Kindle-reported page numbers.) Edit: Fixed author: George not Freeman.