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Wolfram's 2,3 Turing Machine Not Universal
Fishbat writes "In a cutting message to the Foundations of Mathematics mailing list, Stanford's Vaughan Pratt has pointed out an elementary mistake in the recently announced proof that Wolfram's (2,3) machine is universal." Update: 10/30 04:18 GMT by KD : Ed Pegg Jr. from Wolfram Research points to this response to Dr. Pratt's note, which has been submitted to the FoM mailing list but has not yet appeared there due to moderation.
What does that mean? Does this mean that it hasn't been proven to be universal (which is the case if there was just a bug in the proof) or is there another proof that shows the machine is not universal?
kdawson, not proven to be universal and proven to be not universal are two different things.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
This sort of thing is science when it works at its best. Someone throws something out there, and another scientist checks it, and bam, we learn something.
This is my sig.
I love the arrogance.
Had I pushed my luck my second question would have been, who has verified this proof that has taught an automata theory course at a suitably accredited institution?
...so there is an assertion that the putative proof is flawed. How many of you read the proof and can verify that the assertion is correct? Accusing the proof reviewers of laxity seems kind of hypocritical.
Regardless, the guy that wrote that email is a prat.
You're making a mountain out of a mole hill. In this case a student published a proof in a journal of non-peer reviewed work. When it was peer reviewed an error was found. The fact that one young mathematician made an error should hardly cause you to lose faith in the validity of every other theorem proven to date (especially the ones that other scientists actually looked at).
Since you are posting from the heart of the Wolfram Hype Machine (TM), perhaps you could comment on why the prize was announced by Wolfram Himself as being successfully awarded, when Martin Davis on the FOM list states that the committee members were not polled.
This appears to be a flagrant violation of the rules for the prize, which state that "For the purposes of this prize, the treatment of universality in any particular submission must be considered acceptable by the Prize Committee."
To make my question crystal clear: how is it possible that the committee deemed the proof (or its treatment of universality) acceptable when at least some of them were not polled as to whether they thought the proof was acceptable?
p.s. Please don't appeal to a "New Kind of Logic" or a "New Kind of English" in your answer.
Pratt asks: "How did an argument containing such an elementary fallacy get through
the filter?"
Proofs containing elementary errors are published all the time. Peer review is, and always has been, only a way of weeding out some percentage of bad submissions. Peer review that is strict enough to ensure that only correct papers get published would also result in the rejection of many good papers. In fact, some good papers that have advanced science have contained elementary errors.
And people who sit in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Looking through Pratt's publication list, the first two papers I came across on a topic that I know a lot about should never have passed peer review.
Everybody who publishes makes elementary mistakes and makes a fool of himself sometimes; one should respond kindly and gracefully.