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Other people did do it, and even at nearly the exact same time. Turing just did it more convincingly. (See: Alonzo Church and the Lambda calculus).

And Turing helped a lot with the War effort, building hardware (i.e. stuff you can kick) as well as developing theories.

+1. Yeah, I was only thinking of his work on computation (not even AI!). I should have been more clear.