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Wolfram's 2,3 Turing Machine Not Universal

Posted by kdawson on from the whoa-not-so-fast-there-big-fella dept.

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.

2 of 284 comments (clear)

  1. Is not universal? by MarsDefenseMinister · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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  2. Peer Review Rules by tjstork · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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