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Wolfram's 2,3 Turing Machine Is Universal!
Rik702 writes "Wolframscience.com have announced that an undergraduate from Birmingham, UK has proved Wolfram's 2,3 Turing Machine is universal." You can read a pdf of the proof as well as some related coverage.
I hated this subject... If only my lecturer had told me I could win US$25k, it might have been more interesting.
The Bible: Historically verifiable fact from an observers point of view
That was on my To Do list for next week.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
...does it run Linux?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I just finished compiling Wolfram's 2,2 Universal Turing Machine!
Yes the 'blowing it' pun was intended...
The Law of Fives is never wrong.
Without even reading the article, I feel confident to say that, no it does not. All that universal applications allow you to do is run them on both PPC and Intel chips, as opposed to having 2 separate forks for each platform.
(If anyone bothers to take this seriously, and feel they need to correct me, they need to step outside for a while and get some fresh air.)
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
I for one now admit that all previously welcomed overlords can be emulated by this 2 state, 3 color overlord.
@AlexSheive
Yes, but that'll take the 2,3 turing machine 37 billion steps before he can get the answer.
I fail to see the connection between Wolfram's speculation that there will turn out to be very simple universal Turing machines and your banal statement that some countries in the world will go to war. Ergo, the fact that you're not impressed by the proven truth of the former does not, of itself, make it unimpressive.
That doesn't make his huge book any less tedious, however.
... in Soviet Russia at least.
Well said, Comic Book Guy!
As an undergraduate in 1968, I did an independent study that estimated the size of the universal turing machine described in: Davis, Martin (1958), Computability and Unsolvability, New York NY: McGraw-Hill Book Company. This was tedious but not hard. For any slashdotters ready to rush out and implement a working universal Turing machine, be forwarned that your parts list needs to include an infinitely long tape. Worse, when calculating the output of an arbitrary recursive function on your universal Turing machine, you won't know in advance how long the tape needs to be, in case you were cheap and bought a tape with finite length rather than the more expensive infinite one.
The universal Turing machine itself consists of a large but quite finite set of quadruples. The problem is the longish tape.
of this, but it doesn't pass the /. lameness filter ;^)
he could retire in mexico with 25K