What's a Turing machine?

Question

What is a Turing machine and why do people keep mentioning it? My IBM PC is all I need to do my computation! Why does anyone care about these machines?

Answer 1

Turing machine is an abstract machine that can operate on a sequence of data and can change its own state as well as the data while operating, according to some logic.

This is a concept that forms the basis of algorithms, stored programs, and computation in general. It provides good insights and abstractions if you are dealing with algorithms, states, data etc.

Food for thought, for most.