In a Non Deterministic Turing machine, in each branch – you do both possibilities – and only when you are done you “choose” which one is the one you need for the solution (if one exists). For example, let’s look at the subset sum problem, with S = {a,b,c… }. The Non Deterministic Turing machine … Read more
The reason that Turing Machines are a big deal has to do with the study of classical Computing Science or Theory of Computation type stuff. It’s basically about analyzing the general properties of a computer, such as what theoretical abilities and limitations a computer has, as well as what we mean when we talk about … Read more
I literally got assigned the halting problem, as in “write a monitor plugin to determine whether a host is permanently down”. Seriously? OK, so I’ll just give it a threshold. “No, because it might come back up afterward.” Much theoretical exposition ensued.
Paul Rendell implemented a Turing machine in Life. Gliders represent signals, and interactions between them are gates and logic that together can create larger components which implement the Turing machine. Basically, any automatic machinery that can implement AND, OR, and NOT can be combined together in complex enough ways to be Turing-complete. It’s not a … Read more
Turing machines are theoretical concepts invented to explore the domain of computable problems mathematically and to obtain ways of describing these computations. The Von-Neumann architecture is an architecture for constructing actual computers (which implement what the Turing machine describes theoretically). Functional programming is based on the lambda-calculus, which is a another method of describing computations … Read more
Here’s the briefest explanation: A Turing Complete system means a system in which a program can be written that will find an answer (although with no guarantees regarding runtime or memory). So, if somebody says “my new thing is Turing Complete” that means in principle (although often not in practice) it could be used to … Read more