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Wolfram Offers Prize For (2,3) Turing Machine

Posted by kdawson on from the universal-or-not dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica and author of A New Kind of Science, is offering a prize of $25K to anyone who can prove or disprove his conjecture that a particular 2-state, 3-color Turing machine is universal. If true, it would be the simplest universal TM, and possibly the simplest universal computational system. The announcement comes on the 5-year anniversary of the publication of NKS, where among other things Wolfram introduced the current reigning TM champion — 'rule 110,' with 2 states and 5 colors."

1 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. Come on Mr Wolfram! by zborro · · Score: 0, Troll

    I am really sick of this guy's way of doing "science".
    He came out of the scientific community after publishing some
    witty papers and entered in his own ivory tower with a lot of
    money coming from that awful piece of software and now that
    he's not able to overcome this problem shouts to everybody:
    "Hey! I'll give you 25k $ if you solve this!"

    If I were really bright on that subject and able to solve it
    I would just publish on a regular paper and send him an email
    saying: "Hey Mr Wolfram, by the way I solved your problem, now use
    your dirty 25.000$ to buy another bright postdoc's best ideas and
    say that they are yours!"

    Descend on planet Earth Mr Wolfram.