The Turing Award · route
Computer science has no Nobel Prize either. The award that stands in its place carries the name of Alan Turing, who thought of the computer before computers existed. The 81 recipients from 1966 to the 2025 award are marked on the map. Each dot is where the work was done. Run the years and you see the dots crowd into a handful of laboratories and universities.
The Turing Award has been given once a year since 1966 by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). It now carries a million dollars, close to a Nobel Prize. The places to watch on the map are company laboratories more than universities: Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, IBM Research. A good part of the history of the computer was written inside companies.
The list was copied by hand from the ACM's announcements, and “What it was for” is a one-line summary in our own words, not the ACM's citation. There are 15 stations. The five games AlphaGo played against Lee Sedol in Seoul are at the 2024 reinforcement-learning station, and several paths run between these stations and those of the Nobel and Fields routes.