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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.
For some perspectives on the complete nonprofundity and borderline academic dishonesty of Wolfram's book from some people who _do_ know what they're talking about, see this review (PDF) from the Notices of the American Mathematical Society and this collection of many more links to reviews.
Constructive logic destructs my brain.
Wolfram never actually proved Rule 110. The actual work for that was done by Matthew Cook - who presented the paper at a conference while he was working in Wolfram's employ - and eventually got himself and the conference sued. Apparently, working for Wolfram means you sign over any and all papers, ideas, and patents over to him, without receiving any real credit for them.
Another little-known fact is that Wolfram was just one of several people who initially coded Mathematica. He decided one day to take all the code, form a company on his own, and engage in expensive lawsuits with all of his former collaborators to gain ownership of the code.
As far as I'm concerned, the man at this point is wasted intelligence. He may come out with another non-trivial result or two over the course of the rest of his life, but his best contributions to the science may yet come from his wallet - like sponsoring prizes like this one.
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/
The above link is worthwhile, entertaining, and should help bring back anyone who drank the Wolfram Kool-Aid.
(go blue)
But it's worth noting that the Rule 110 proof, while not hogwash, was also not Wolfram's.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The wolfram site is slashdotted but this link for the article in nature is not.
~ In Trust, We Trust ~
Alan Turing is usually considered to be the father of computers. He invented a theoretical machine that he conjectured could solve any problem that could be solved by a machine. It consisted of a an infinitely long tape (memory) and a small finite set of operations that could be performed infinitely fast. Modern computers are *very* similar to his theoretical machine, except they're only very fast (as opposed to infinitely fast) and they only have a lot of memory (as opposed to an infinite amount of memory). No one has ever found a problem that could be solved by a more complex machine and could show that it couldn't be solved by a Turing machine. (BTW, Turing eventually killed himself by eating a poisoned apple after most of the scientific community shunned his work due to some personal habits. This was the inspiration for Apple computers' logo.) So Wolfram proposed an even simpler machine and conjectured that it could solve anything that a Turing machine could solve. Now this guy proved that Wolfram was right. I should mention for completeness that two other guys (Church, and dang, I forgot the other one) also proposed systems that were provably equivalent to Turing's machine around the same time, but Turing's was the easiest one to turn into an actual machine.
I believe it's "the machine can be in one of two states, and each point on the tape can have one of three colors"; not "a machine that has two states, each of which can be three colors," which is gibberish.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.