Friday, October 26, 2007

Tic Tac Toe

Alex Smith, a 20 year old Birmingham undergraduate, has been awarded the Wolfram prize for proving that the (2,3) Turing machine is universal. This is a very basic machine with a three letter alphabet (say 0,1 and 2) and only two states, obeying the state diagram where $m:n$ represents a substitution of the letter $m$ for the letter $n$. The third number on an arrow labels the offset of the head for that move.

Wolfram says that such a universal machine could be used as a basis for building computers from simple molecules, such as DNA.
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2 comments:

  1. MetatronOctober 27, 2007 7:59 AM

    The solution isn't hugely relevant to modern computer science, says Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

    lol Clearly, this guy doesn't know about the implications for black hole research.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousOctober 30, 2007 8:20 AM

    Update: Aaronson pontificating on his own brilliance once again.

    ReplyDelete

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