I want to test the ability of students to read a passage and answer questions about it. Could you please come up with a good question for the passage "Before the actual research explicitly devoted to the complexity of algorithmic problems started off, numerous foundations were laid out by various researchers. Most influential among these was the definition of Turing machines by Alan Turing in 1936, which turned out to be a very robust and flexible simplification of a computer."? 

The process of making something simpler is called?